Your online presence is your key to opening or shutting the doors to positive student communication, conflict resolution, and learning. Join us and share ways of becoming visible to students while in your synchronous online classroom and while communicating asynchronously with your students whether through postings or e-mail. Choose to be a professor who is clearly seen and heard in the world of online learning.

This session is open to ALL faculty—whether you teach online or on-campus. Visit the Faculty Fellows Hub to get complete details on all the sessions being offered.

Interested in signing up for this session? RSVP today!

Student Support offices across the college have been hard at work on a new Simmons platform for student advising, and now Starfish is almost here! Starfish is a toolset for advisors and student support staff to better guide students in pursuit of their educational goals. We are preparing to launch Starfish for undergraduate students and our Nursing@Simmons and SocialWork@Simmons programs.

Starfish provides advisors with critical information about their advisees’ course of study and allows them to log notes, set up appointments, make referrals, and connect with the rest of a student’s support network in a single, easy-to-use platform.

Click to see full-size image

As advisors and instructors begin to use Starfish in the coming months, students can expect:

• Advisors will have access to more information about your courses, academic plans, and performance
• Communications from faculty and staff, including:
  • Academic Alerts from faculty – early warnings and guidance on how to address potential issues
  • Kudos for exceptional or improved performance
  • Referral notifications
• Faculty and staff will be better empowered to follow up on requests and help students identify and work through academic challenges
• Services Listing – find hours, location, and contact information for student support offices
• “Raise Your Hand” – when you have a specific question but aren’t sure where to turn, use this feature to ask for help by topic

Additional details and training materials about Starfish usage for faculty and staff are coming soon. To learn more about the project and its goals, please visit our project website.

It’s not easy being a faculty instructor. You are expected to know laws affecting you and those you teach, inside and outside of the classroom. If you have ever wondered what certain laws or Simmons policies really require, if you sometimes struggle to balance classroom rights and responsibilities, or if you want to have greater confidence about legal issues in higher education, we invite you to attend this program.

The instructor will answer commonly asked questions by faculty compiled through her more than 25 years of advising and representing colleges and universities, and their faculty, Deans, and Presidents. Attendees will be invited to submit questions prior to the program.

This session is open to ALL faculty—whether you teach online or on-campus. Visit the Faculty Fellows Hub to get complete details on all the sessions being offered.

Interested in signing up for this session? RSVP today!

Our Endpoint Systems team and Service Desk staff are keeping the computer replacement project on track, on time, and on budget.

During March, they completed the final round of department scheduling and moved forward with additional deployments to faculty and staff across campus.

Throughout the spring semester, our team will continue with computer replacements based on the planning we’ve done with each department. If you have questions about the project or your eligibility to receive a new computer, please visit our project website or contact the Service Desk.

In the event of an emergency, we want to ensure that every member of the Simmons community gets the message. To help communicate information as quickly and effectively as possible, Simmons Technology is working in tandem with Public Safety to expand our emergency alert system.

In the near future, the alerts that are sent to your email and phone—via automated voice message and text—will also appear on digital signage on the Academic and Residence Campuses, and as desktop alerts on Simmons-owned computers.

Behind the scenes, Public Safety will make use of one-click alerts that will be sent to the entire community. This means that with the click of a button, Public Safety can send nearly instantaneous alerts of an on-campus emergency via phone, email, computer desktop messages, and digital signage.

Because emergency notifications are only effective if they reach you, we encourage everyone to verify and update your emergency contact information on file with the College. Students should update their info in Simmons Connection (step-by-step instructions) while faculty and staff should use Workday (step-by-step instructions).

This session will look at the best practices for engaging students in meaningful discussion. This will include tips for handling discussions in multiple venues: in a face-to-face classroom, an asynchronous online discussion board and in the synchronous or virtual classroom.

Topics covered will include: establishing community, writing good questions, defining expectations, handling disruptive students and balancing workload. This will be an interactive workshop where you will leave with tools for creating your own engaging classroom activities. Bring your own experience and ideas so everyone can get talking!

This session is open to ALL faculty—whether you teach online or on-campus. Visit the Faculty Fellows Hub to get complete details on all the sessions being offered.

Interested in signing up for this session? RSVP today!

Creating and keeping track of your passwords is no easy task. They need to meet a lengthy set of criteria in order to be secure. They should be at least eight characters long, and include a capital letter, and a number, and a symbol. And they shouldn’t include any personal information, like your name or birthdate, or any common password elements. Oh, and as a reminder, you shouldn’t reuse passwords for multiple services.

So, once you’ve got all that covered, the hardest part might be remembering your passwords for each online service you use. To help solve this problem, Simmons Technology provides password management software called KeePass, an open-source password manager that helps you to create and store a database of your passwords and only allows access using a single master password.

KeePass is installed on all Simmons-owned Windows and Mac computers. To install KeePass on your personal computer, you can download it at KeePass.info (for Windows) or KeePassX.org (for Mac).

If you decide to use KeePass or another password management tool, please be mindful of phishing attempts via email and never give your master password to anyone. As a reminder, Simmons Technology will never ask you for your password and we’ll never send you a link with a request to change your password.

Do you own an internet-connected device other than your phone and computer? Most of us do, whether it’s a smartwatch, fitness tracker, baby monitor, or even your car. In fact, researchers predict there will be more than 20 billion internet-connected devices in use by 2020.

These connected devices make our lives easier and can provide peace of mind. Knowing that you did in fact turn off the oven or that your cat is doing just fine while you’re on vacation is nice. But what if someone else was able to view and record video of your home or steal personal data from your Fitbit?

These are the dangers of new technology being a step or two ahead of information security. We get frequent reminders to change passwords and keep antivirus software up-to-date, but we don’t hear much about securing other types of devices. These products, which collectively are referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT), are vulnerable to the same attacks that threaten our computers and mobile devices.

Last October, there was a widespread outage of major websites, including Netflix, Twitter, and Spotify. The outage lasted for hours and was the result of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). These types of attacks involve sending a flood of traffic to a website in order to overwhelm its resources. Often, this traffic is generated by using large numbers of computers infected with malware to help attack a website. DDoS attacks have long been a popular tool among cyber criminals, but this one had a relatively new wrinkle—many of the devices involved were security cameras and other internet-connected devices.

Ensuring the security of internet-connected devices is a major concern. While your DVR probably wasn’t involved in this recent attack, that doesn’t mean that it—and other devices in your home—aren’t vulnerable to attacks. Large-scale efforts are underway in both the government and private sectors to improve security for IoT devices and getting it right is critically important as threats continue to evolve.

While this work is ongoing, there are several steps you can take right now to secure your devices:

• The easiest is to ensure that your home network is secure by creating a strong WiFi password and enabling your router’s firewall. Check with your internet service provider for how-to guides to getting this done.
• Another important step is to keep your devices and home network equipment up-to-date. Periodically check for updates to your devices and don’t ignore alerts or notifications from device manufacturers requesting that you run an update.
• Lastly, decide what devices actually need to be connected to the internet. Consider the advantages of connecting and assess whether it’s worth the risk. You probably want to be able to check your home security system from your phone, but it’s very likely that a toaster oven can do its job without being online.

This spring, Simmons Technology, Undergraduate Advising, Student Life, and the Registrar’s Office are working to launch a new centralized platform for Student Advising—Starfish. Starfish is an Integrated Planning & Advising System (IPAS) that will make it more convenient for students to access support resources, manage advising appointments, and respond to advising “to-dos.”

Starfish will also enable faculty and student support staff to access records in one consolidated location, direct students to resources, access photo rosters, and communicate more easily between offices. Using a single system means more effective referrals and timelier outreach to students. In addition, it will help the College to continually improve programming centered on advising. This is a long-needed system that will greatly improve our ability to support students in meeting their educational goals.

At first, this software will be available for Undergraduate students and our Online Social Work and Online Nursing programs. Once launched, we will begin to expand into other disciplines. We are hard at work configuring this software and creating the policies and procedures to make its launch possible. To learn more about the project and its goals, please visit our project web site.

Simmons is a frequent target of phishing attacks, in which criminals attempt to obtain personal information, gain access to your email account, or compromise your computer. Links in phishing emails may take you to websites that look very much like services you use, and attachments in phishing emails are a prime source of viruses and malware.

To help protect everyone at the College, Simmons Technology is requiring you to change your password as soon as possible. If you have already changed your password after receiving Information Security Officer David Bruce’s email on Jan 10, you don’t need to take any further action. Instructions for changing your password can be found on the Simmons College Service Desk website by clicking on the red “Change your password” banner at the top of the home page.

We also encourage you to be vigilant when using other web-based services. If you receive suspicious emails or account-related requests, contact the service provider directly for assistance.

If you believe you have fallen prey to a phishing attack, or have any questions about keeping your information secure, please call the Service Desk at 617-521-2222.