Academic Technologies Support

Service Owner: Dan Ihm

NIU’s Division of Information Technology (DoIT) implements, maintains and supports NIU’s core academic applications systems which include:

AnywhereApps

AnywhereApps provides access to course-specific software from desktops and mobile devices.

Blackboard

Blackboard Learning Solutions back-end support for:

• Collaborate for web conferencing, distance learning, and class recording.
• Organizations available to NIU faculty, staff, students and affiliates for NIU organizations and clubs,
• full content storage with Content Collection.
• eReserves that link directly to library materials within a Blackboard course.
• Grade Submission to MyNIU to save time and reduce the opportunity for data entry errors.
• Learn for online course delivery and web-based learning including integrated clickers in the Student Response System.
• Portfolios that can be shared with NIU faculty, staff and students or sent to external guests like employers or references.

Kaltura

Kaltura is a campus-wide video hosting, creation, and publishing platform to:

• Upload, store, and share your existing video content, created outside of Kaltura (PowerPoint to MP4, smartphone video, tablet recordings).
• Capture, upload, and share smartphone video using the KMSGo app for iOS and Android.
• Create and share quick webcam/microphone videos for introductions, micro-lectures, video feedback.
• Create and share screen recording videos by recording webcam, screen, and/or narration using Kaltura Capture.
• Incorporate YouTube videos into your Kaltura media library and embed and play through the Kaltura player in Blackboard.
• Take advantage of excellent automatic closed captioning, with simple caption editing and video transcripts.
• Edit videos in Kaltura, create video quizzes, and branching video experiences.
• Share, organize, and manage videos using MediaSpace.
• Schedule Kaltura Classroom Lecture Capture recordings in select campus classrooms.

Mobile Applications

• Blackboard Mobile Learn.
  
• MyNIU for easy access to MyNIU Student Self-Service.

Qualtrics

Qualtrics survey software available to all NIU faculty, staff and students with the ability to:

• Track participation, send invitations and reminders, and distribute the survey to selected email recipients or with anonymous links.
• > 90 question types, delivered or customized templates and reports.
• Allow respondents to select languages for survey translation.
• Display survey results graphically and statistically in real time and export raw data in a variety of formats including CSV, XML, HTML and SPSS, and popular statistical packages.
• Collaborate with NIU or other colleagues with a Qualtrics license.