AI Initiatives

The Division of Information Technology’s AI site will help the UMBC community with information on using artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI (GenAI), to support UMBC’s Administrative, Instructional, and Research efforts. This site has been created to help employees advance their use of GenAI. We recommend that our UMBC community begin by visiting GenAI Tools, this page will highlight what free resources are available to use and what options exist to use GenAI while safeguarding UMBC institutional data safely.

For staff providing support, we encourage people to look at Administrative AI, as a starting point. Our goal is to save folks time and improve the quality of their work, thus increasing productivity. We highlight some tools that DoIT is providing for support.

Additionally, we have launched an AI-supported search bar called myUMBC Answers.  We are seeking partners to work with DoIT to expand myUMBC Answers. The key to your office leveraging myUMBC Answers is providing validated and accurate content, such as FAQs or a handbook produced annually.

For faculty, we encourage you to also explore instructional AI and research AI. An excellent resource in the College of Engineering is the UMBC Center for AI.  You can follow news about the UMBC Center for AI on social media through its sites on LinkedIn, Bluesky, X, and Facebook. Members of the UMBC community can subscribe to the UMBC AI Group to receive email about AI-related news and events. If you have news to share with the UMBC AI community or suggestions or comments on the site, please send them to umbc-ai@cs.umbc.edu.

 

AI News

Showing items tagged effective-practices. Show All

Four Biology Faculty Give 1st Exam In-class AND Online

WiFi & student laptops turn UC into a "testing center"

Before the Spring 22 semester started, four Biological Sciences professors -- David Eisenmann, Hua Lu, Jeffrey Leips, and Kevin Omland -- reached out to DoIT to see if they could (and should) try...

Posted: March 3, 2022, 4:16 PM

Panopto: Recording, Hosting, and Engaging

Leveraging Screencasting to Support Instructional Strategies

UMBC adopted Panopto in fall 2018. Use has increased since this time, in particular spurred on by geometrically increased adoption with the migration to fully online and then hybrid learning in...

Posted: February 8, 2022, 9:40 AM

5 reasons you should open your Blackboard course early

Benefits help students and instructors

At UMBC, courses are created in Blackboard about four weeks before a new semester begins, providing time for faculty to transition instructional materials and assessments into a new site for...

Posted: January 20, 2022, 11:01 AM

VoiceThread Assignments for Media Projects and Peer Critique

One Instructor’s Use Case and Lessons Learned

Shifting to teaching in online and hybrid formats has created opportunities to identify how students can share multimedia projects and receive feedback through peer critique. While various tools...

Posted: September 17, 2021, 12:18 PM

13 Tips to Get Your Blackboard Course Ready

Checklist to optimize your course before the semester starts

Prepare your Blackboard course shell for the new semester with our updated baker’s dozen checklist. 1. Review new tools & features in Blackboard. Our Blackboard site receives updates and...

Posted: August 17, 2021, 12:02 PM