GRCC In the News, 5-2-17

Retired Steven Ender talks about his tenure at GRCC

May 1, 2017; MLive

GRAND RAPIDS, MI – Steven Ender beamed with pride recently talking about his love for Grand Rapids Community College students, and how refreshing it was that they come without any sense of entitlement, but an understanding the experience will move them further ahead in their lives.

Celebrating Failure

May 1, 2017; Revue West Michigan

Failure is not a word that many people take lightly. It’s certainly not something many would like to admit they are dealing with or have experienced. And yet, a local business-turned-movement is celebrating five years of failure this month.

… Recently, the company (Failure: Lab) did a workshop with Dell, Inc. in Austin, Texas and finished up projects in New York and Florida. They have also facilitated workshops locally with Grand Rapids Community College and Grand Valley State University and businesses such as Steelcase and Herman Miller.

New student orientation kicks off today

Our large group orientations begin today! We will be welcoming 150 students and their guests to campus on Tuesday, May 2, to kick off the orientation season.  Orientation on Tuesday begins at 12:30.  Our ambassadors will be directing our guests around campus and you will recognize them by their matching blue polo shirts.  Should you encounter any lost students, please give them a warm GRCC welcome, and direct them to the Raider Grille.  Orientations will take place twice a week, every week, but the days and time will vary; however ,they will always kick off in the Raider Grille.  All sessions are in 25Live.  Thank you all for helping us welcome our new Fall students to campus!

Blackboard upgrade on May 4

Technology notification:

On May 4th, from 6-9 a.m., Blackboard Learn will be upgraded to Learn 9.1 Q4 2016 Cumulative Update 1. During the scheduled maintenance, Blackboard will be unavailable. Please review your courses and organizations in Blackboard prior to the upgrade to ensure everything is working as expected and you are familiar with the changes. You can evaluate the Blackboard updates in our test environment at https://bbtst.grcc.edu (on campus only). The test environment is a copy of the production environment as of February 1.

With this upgrade, the new Blackboard Learn 2016 theme will be applied, so it will look slightly different. The new theme improves the experience for mobile users. Additionally, this theme was designed with WCAG 2.0 principles in mind and follows accessibility guidelines for structure, color contrast, and navigation. Please note, modifying course themes and some branding configuration settings are no longer supported. The course themes option will be replaced with the Blackboard delivered theme, which is a more consistent, mobile-friendly and accessible interface. In addition, we added a “Mobile” tab that contains a different module layout that we believe better aligns with the mobile experience (i.e. My Course List module resides on the left, so it is the first module presented to a mobile device). More information on this can be found in the announcement section located on the login page. The Mobile tab will not be pushed to production and is only used for demonstration purposes. We welcome your feedback on adjusting the layout of various modules to improve the overall mobile experience.

Listed below are a couple of the feature enhancements and quality improvements in this release. For a full list of updates, please refer to the Blackboard release notes, which can be found at https://en-us.help.blackboard.com/Learn/Administrator/Hosting/Release_Notes/Release_Notes_All_91_Releases/Release_Notes_9.1_2016_Q4.

• Improved mobile experience and accessibility
• Ability to drag and drop files
• Submission receipts
• Reminders
• Dropbox integration

If you have questions or concerns, please contact IT Customer Support at 234-HELP or ITSupport@grcc.edu. If you have questions about how to use the new features, contact DLIT at 234-3205 or DLIT@grcc.edu.

Important message from Supplier Inclusion Team

The Supplier Inclusion Team would like purchasers campus-wide to consider small or diverse businesses for department quoted purchases. You can find a number of resources for locating small and diverse businesses to meet your departmental needs at the brand new Supplier Diversity & Inclusion webpage. The webpage features Supplier Inclusion Team Advocates, diverse supplier directories and resources, current GRCC diverse suppliers, best practices and more. Check it out! Questions? Call Purchasing at ext. 3850.