Throughout this period of crisis, UNIL will send you a regular newsletter containing information on the progress of online teaching as well as advice on how to organize your distance learning.
You are receiving the first issue of our newsletter "Teach" in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic. As of today, in order to respond more specifically to the information needs of the various members of the UNIL community, we will regularly send targeted information, through three separate newsletters:
The content of all the newsletters will also be published on the Coronavirus website, whose navigation is organized according to the same three keywords.
Prefer an asynchronous teaching mode when possible
During this period, it is necessary to rethink one's teaching and to give maximum priority to asynchronous rather than live teaching whenever possible.
As you will have seen since the beginning of this week, no infrastructure has ever experienced the current traffic associated with quarantining all European countries and moving all their populations to teleworking or telelearning. In this unprecedented situation, all the tools that we or the other institutions are promoting will run into problems at one time or another. Many of you have already had to deal with the bumpy behavior of WebEx. The problem is the same for most offers of this type (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc.).
It is likely that this type of difficulty will occur again in the next few days. When it will be able to do so, our IT Centre will anticipate these disruptions by using this communication channel (email via distribution list). As a user, you can also consult the status page of our supplier, Cisco, at any time by clicking on this link https://status.webex.com/service/status?lang=en_US.
For all of you who use WebEx in an educational context, we recommend that you contact the educational engineers at your faculties or the Centre de soutien à l’enseignement (CSE) if your faculty/school does not have educational engineers, who will be able to present you with alternative options to this tool that the CSE has put in place.
The best alternative is the creation of commented presentations (Powerpoint/Keynote) and their recording in mp4.
Powerpoint tutorial (in French)
It is then possible to put them online on UBICAST with an mp4 export and if the service is interrupted for a few hours, the consequences will be manageable.
At the UBICAST level, it is quite possible that the processing of a video may take a few hours, our UNIL instance must permanently manage hundreds of videos that are inserted in a waiting list for their processing. It is therefore important that you are aware of this reality and can act accordingly.
Beyond all these solutions that allow you to carry out your teachings via audio-visual supports, we draw your attention to the importance that our Moodle platform plays in putting your courses online. In addition to the videos that you will produce, it will allow you to structure and share many varied resources and it will also allow you to ensure a communication link with your students.
Pedagogical and technical support to accompany you throughout this period
The teaching page on the site is updated daily.
As you can see, webinars are offered every day, morning and evening, and they are very successful. These help disseminate basic information and relieve the burden on specialist colleagues so that they can be present for more complex requests.
Webex: 9:15-9:45
Link: https://unil.webex.com/unil-fr/j.php?MTID=mcf42e1f9c252fe70495fbb747cdb6e3f
UBICAST: 10:15-10:45
Link: https://unil.webex.com/unil-fr/j.php?MTID=mf67e82aba2cdbaad4fc4821d788e6e6c
Moodle: 11:00-11:45
Link: https://unil.webex.com/unil-fr/j.php?MTID=mca100f384d99e75b807a7f026ba422d6
Pedagogy and distance learning: 13:00-13:45
Link: https://unil.webex.com/unil-fr/j.php?MTID=m52d5aca4abc2ae5deda9c64ad6857d91
Webex: 15:30-16:00
Link: https://unil.webex.com/unil-fr/j.php?MTID=m6cd4263c792b1c8cd5a5030ecc85abf6
UBICAST: 16:15-16:45
Link: https://unil.webex.com/unil-fr/j.php?MTID=m561034f14b49f1136a202c3801e59407
Moodle: 17:00-17:30
Link: https://unil.webex.com/unil-fr/j.php?MTID=m70c6631ff83f8ce65b57648af211ea62
These webinars will be reduced in the coming days and will be replaced by video tutorials to give you more flexibility in your organization.
We ask you to send your requests for advice/support to elearning@unil.ch, which is managed like the help desk and sends the tickets back to the pedagogical support teams of the faculties, the Centre de soutien à l’enseignement - CSE or the IT Centre.
Message from Rector Nouria Hernandez to UNIL students
Finally, we would like to thank you for viewing the message from our Rector, Nouria Hernandez, concerning the codes of conduct to be respected in this unprecedented situation.
Creation of a "Teaching" working group
In order to coordinate all these actions, a "Teaching" working group has been set up since last week, integrating several people from the UNIL crisis unit (Rectorate and support services) as well as the vice-deans of teaching, school principals and the Medical Pedagogy Unit (Unité de pédagogie médicale). This group, led by Vice-Rector Zanetti, has the task of coordinating actions at the University level in order to ensure the continuity of teaching and to deal with any difficulties that may be encountered in each of your faculties.
Phishing
Many people have been receiving malicious emails over the past few days, stating that "your incoming emails have been blocked". If you receive such an email, DO NOT CLICK on the links it contains and report it to helpdesk@unil.ch. If in doubt, you can also contact this support team. As a reminder, the IT department never blocks emails. Anti-spam tools and information on how to avoid phishing are available here. The IT Centre also produces detailed articles on this topic at https://wp.unil.ch/cinn/?s=phishing.
Find all the newsletters and general info on https://www.unil.ch/coronavirus/en/home.html