Technology for You and Your Students

Key UNL Teaching Technologies

A good starting point for your UNL teaching career is to familiarize yourself with key technologies that we use on our campus. There are three main technologies that UNL instructors use most frequently:

Canvas

Canvas is the University’s learning management system. It’s the system where you will engage with students by posting your syllabus and assignments, entering grades on assignments so that students can know their progress, and utilizing other features such as discussion boards or SpeedGrader.

Your Canvas course sites, found at my.unl.edu, are automatically created for every official course you teach. Canvas 101 is a self-paced Canvas orientation course designed to familiarize you with basic need-to-know tools and features.

MyRED

MyRED is the University’s Student Information System. It’s the system that students use to register for their courses and where you will find your course rosters at the beginning of the semester and enter final grades at the end. UNL has developed a new process enabling instructors to easily import final grades directly from Canvas into MyRED. For more information, see these instructions.

To find your course rosters, you log into MyRED using your NUID and TrueYou password (the same credentials you use for your Firefly account). Then click on the faculty tab and then on Class Roster.

Additional Technologies & Technology Services

UNL’s Information Technology Services provides a whole range of ITS services. This faculty tech guide outlines numerous services designed to meet the computing, communications, and networking needs of UNL faculty, staff and students. Some of the available tools and resources are listed below.

Turnitin

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has partnered with the third-party application Turnitin to help maintain our standards of excellence in academic integrity. Turnitin is a suite of tools that provide instructors with information about the authenticity of submitted work and facilitates the process of grading for instructors. Submitted files are compared against an extensive database of content comprising of over 165 million journal articles, 850 million student papers, and 62 billion, current and archived, websites. Turnitin produces a similarity report and a similarity score. A similarity score is the percentage of a document that is similar to content held within the database. A similarity report gives the instructor more information about any potential matches and their sources. Turnitin does not determine if an instance of plagiarism has occurred. Instead, it gives instructors the information they need to determine the authenticity of work as a part of a larger process. All submissions to this course may be checked using Turnitin.

Note: Please visit information about Academic Honesty and Student Code of Conduct at UNL.

Zoom

Zoomis a cloud-based, web collaboration video service that connects multiple conference rooms and remote users for online classes, meetings, and group projects. It integrates with Canvas and is available to all faculty and staff.

UNL Academic Video

The University of Nebraska System has decided to move forward with full implementation of YuJa as our video content management solution replacement of VidGrid. YuJa is an all-in-one video experience to securely create, manage, discover, and collaborate video content across any device.

Academic Video features:

Members of the Academic Technology team are available to provide YuJa training to groups of faculty. If your department or college would like to schedule a training session, please contact Kate McCown . There is also an asynchronous YuJa training course available here.

Student Response Systems

Student Response Systems (SRS) include a set of hardware and software that facilitate teaching activities such as allowing you to pose multiple-choice questions to students, gather responses during a lecture, and display these responses via a computer projector.

Office 365

UNL has partnered with Office 365 which is a cloud-based subscription service that brings together tools like Excel and Outlook with other cloud services such as OneDrive and Microsoft Teams.

Wireless Campus

The University provides access to the internet via wireless network available in most buildings on campus as well as many outdoor common areas. Learn how to connect to campus wifi for these services.

Digital Learning Center (DLC)

The Digital Learning Center Exam Commons provides a web-based assessment service in a large-scale proctored environment. It is located in the southeast corner of the Adele Coryell Hall Learning Commons (Love Library North). All tests are conducted at this location and all testing times must be pre-scheduled by students in advance.

Exam Scanning

Akindi is the new UNL bubble-sheet assessment platform, and a replacement to campus Scantron processing services, which ended in May 2022.

Akindi allows for faculty to create, facilitate, and scan their own bubble-sheet assessments without the need for proprietary sheets or special machines.
Akindi assessments are printed on normal 8.5" by 11" sheets of paper and scanned with common multi-function (all-in-one) printer/scanners with a scan to e-mail function.
Akindi is integrated through Canvas so assessment scores can be automatically synced into your Canvas gradebook.

Design Services

The Pixel Lab is a Design Center that provides quality, expert technical and creative services to all UNL students, faculty and staff, including color and large format printing, graphic design, photography, and research poster templates and printing.