Audiences looking for some out-of-the-box virtual entertainment can find it in the inaugural StartUP Festival, a celebration of student work supported by the staff and faculty of University Players.

The festival is based on the BFA in Acting Character Study projects, normally produced in the live studio spaces of the School of Dramatic Art, but pivoted this year to online performance.

Each student in the graduating class has written a one-act play no more than 25 minutes long, covering a wide range of genres: imaginative period pieces, stories that touch on the actors’ own histories, characters battling their way through a post-apocalyptic future, and fantastical settings that explore the origin of life itself.

A brief description of each show is available on the UP website, and trailers are released daily for each piece on the UP Instagram and Facebook pages.

The University Players’ StartUP Festival opened this week and continues to run until May 31 on the company’s YouTube channel. New shows are released six days a week through May 22. Tickets are available at the University Players Box Office.

Watch a pre-show panel discussion with student creators Elena Reyes, Alison Adams, and Jonnie Lombard, along with directing consultants Marc Bondy and Lee Wilson:

Scholars and educators from 24 countries will delve into the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students in online or open environments during the International Teaching Online Symposium, hosted by the University of Windsor via Microsoft Teams, June 17 and 18.

Organizers have scheduled 116 sessions to share research, and registration is already more than halfway to its goal of 300 participants.

“We have 164 persons registered representing Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, and Oceania, which makes our symposium a truly international gathering,” says project director Clayton Smith, associate professor in the UWindsor Faculty of Education.

He points to the increasing engagement of international students in the open or online learning world as an impetus for the symposium.

“Some of these students enrol in fully online coursework, while others engage in online learning at the individual course level, both of which require varying degrees of synchronous and asynchronous participation,” says Dr. Smith. “With the current pandemic, it is evident that online learning is becoming a new trend. Finding strategies to teach culturally and linguistically diverse international students in online settings is essential to ensure their success.”

Fatme Ammar, an Outstanding Scholars student who belongs to the Teaching International Students Research Group, notes the

“Seeing the rise of international students in our online classrooms, especially after this year, allowed us to realize the importance of ensuring fair teaching practices so that all students can receive the education they deserve,” says Fatme Ammar, Outstanding Scholars student and member of the Teaching International Students Research Group.

Registration for the symposium is free, with a deadline of June 4. Post-secondary students who register and attend will be entered in a draw to win one of four $100 gift cards.

Find a detailed program and more information on the conference website.

Upgrades to the video services in Microsoft 365 will simplify the sharing of video content and allow for new features including anonymous and timed sharing. These changes will take place during the summer months of 2021 and will impact how videos are stored and shared to be in line with other Microsoft programs.

One of the initial changes deals with recordings of Microsoft Teams meetings. Starting May 10, when a Teams meeting is recorded, the video will now be stored in OneDrive (for a regular Teams meeting) or SharePoint (for meetings held in a Team channel), instead of the Classic Microsoft Stream site.

Many features of meeting recordings will remain as they are now, including:

• a link to the recording being automatically placed in the meeting chat and calendar event,
• permissions being granted automatically to the meeting participants, and
• the individual who clicked on the Record button being the “owner” of the video.

Once videos are recorded, they can be found in the Recordings folder in OneDrive. If the meeting was held in a Teams channel, the video will be stored in the Recordings folder of that Team’s Files tab.

An upgraded player is scheduled for release in July of this year. Until then, some features will be missing from the OneDrive/SharePoint video player: captions and transcript, variable playback speed, transcript search, and preventing download.

If you require captions and other features before the new player is released, upload your video to the Classic Stream site and transcripts and captions will be automatically generated; you can then share the link to the video in the Classic Stream site.

Find more information:

• Article - Microsoft Stream 2.0 (teamdynamix.com)
• Announcing the Next Phase for the New Version of Microsoft Stream

Microsoft Lists is an app that helps users track information and organize work.

Much like in other Microsoft products, users can add comments or conversations to individual items in a Microsoft List. Watch Information Technology Services team member Jonathan North describe the difference between comments and conversations as well as best practices for using them in this 96-second Tech Talk video.

For more information about Microsoft Lists, click on the link in the Comments section below the video. Alternatively, check out IT Services’ growing series of Tech videos about Lists here.

Tech Talk is a presentation of IT Services. More Tech Talks are available at www.uwindsor.ca/its/tech-talk.

Campus partners are working to maintain a robust set of Knowledge Base Articles (KBAs).

The team will continue to compile a weekly digest of the most-referenced KBAs to streamline student-focused questions to ask.UWindsor to support consistent communication with current and future students.

These are this week’s top-five referenced KBAs:

• How can I receive a Graduation Eligibility Letter? (615)
• How do I extend my UWin account? (314)
• Can I defer my graduate offer? (687)
• I have accepted an offer of admission to UWindsor. How do I set up my multi-factor authentication options? (536)
• How do I view my offer of admission to an undergraduate program at UWindsor? (351)

You can submit common questions or make suggestions to the KBA team at askkba@uwindsor.ca.