The Office of Information Technology (OIT) Academic Technology Services unit’s mission is to empower SMU’s academic communities, enable innovative teaching and collaboration, and enhance student experiences. To do this, we work with SMU to invest in solutions and tools that align and integrate with the goals of needs of faculty and students. OIT helps maximize SMU’s investments in these powerful technology solutions by providing dedicated user support, training and resource maintenance.
Course Management System: Canvas
Canvas is SMU’s course management system for all course-related curriculum delivery needs. Canvas’ powerful tools offer rich resources for all modes of instruction serving traditional, blended and fully on-line classrooms.
smu.edu/Canvas
Course Video-conferencing: Zoom
Zoom is SMU’s web video-conferencing tool for courses and approved special use cases. Zoom is a “best in class” leader in modern video communications, enabling conferencing, collaboration, chat and “virtual classrooms” across mobile devices, desktop computers and telephones. Zoom is easy to use and integrates with Canvas.
smu.edu/Zoom
Course Media Management: Panopto
Panopto is a set of tools for creating, editing, managing, captioning and delivering video and audio content within Canvas courses.
smu.edu/Panopto
Plagiarism Detection: Turnitin
Turnitin is a tool which allows students and faculty to submit assignments within Canvas to check their similarity against millions of other sources, including websites, journal articles and other student assignments.
smu.edu/OIT/Services/Canvas/Plagiarism
Secure Online Testing: LockDown Browser
The LockDown Browser locks down Canvas-based testing environments to help prevent cheating. The tool prevents student test-takers from copying, printing, opening new tabs, accessing other applications, or visiting other websites during online Canvas exams.
smu.edu/OIT/Services/LockDownBrowser
Exploring Your Classroom’s Technologies
This powerful web-tool allows faculty to explore SMU’s different types of classrooms and identify the technology resources within the various teaching spaces. The search tool identifies centrally managed classrooms which meet the selected criteria to help faculty identify spaces for potential scheduling.
smu.edu/classroomIT
File Sharing, Storage & Collaboration: Box
Box cloud storage is available to all active SMU faculty, staff, and students. In addition to storing files, Box allows for easy collaboration with groups via multiple methods. Departments on campus can also request a departmental Box in addition to their individual accounts.
smu.edu/Box
Cloud Survey & Analytics: Qualtrics
Qualtrics is a cloud-based survey and customer experience system that enables students, faculty, and staff to produce and distribute engaging surveys to gather data.
smu.edu/Qualtrics
Office in the Cloud: Office 365
Office 365 is a suite of online tools and services provided by Microsoft available to students, faculty, and staff. This includes Microsoft Office as well as the OneDrive cloud storage system.
smu.edu/o365
Connecting to Librarians within Courses: LibGuides
Canvas allows instructors to work connect the right library resources with the right courses. SMU’s LibGuides tool in Canvas allows students to make connection with the library guides, resources and people relevant to that specific course.
SMU LibGuides
Virtual Applications: Apps.SMU
Apps.SMU provides access to a variety of applications within a virtualized environment. Authorized individuals can login via a web browser, or into Citrix Receiver and then launch approved applications. When launched, an application runs in the SMU private cloud, but looks and feels as though it is running locally on your device.
smu.edu/AppsSMU
New Ideas
No list is likely to provide everything tool or solution which faculty and staff might want to utilize, test or simply learn more about. OIT will always do our best to find the right solution for the right idea with the resources available. If you have an idea or a suggestion for a new instructional technology tool or innovation, please submit your idea at the link below! Click the “Submit Idea” button and an OIT team member will follow up with you to learn more about your idea.
New Ideas