We hope you had a great summer and are enjoying being back on campus. As you have no doubt noticed by now, we made some changes and additions to our existing academic technology services services over the summer.

First, on May 25th, we upgraded OU’s instance of Desire2Learn. Upgrading existing services like D2L is critical to keeping these services secure, supportable and reliable. If you would like more information about this version of D2L, please visit our D2L upgrade page.

We updated the look and feel of oZONE, something that has not been done for over 5 years. In an effort to keep this site current and functional for our users, we opted for a clean, easy to navigate design that will be the first step in an overhaul of the current oZONE portal. We hope that you will give us suggestions and ideas for future updates at itfeedback@ou.edu.

Our physical spaces also received updates this summer. Seven campus classrooms were fully renovated, several additional classrooms received technology upgrades and over half of the computers in OU IT managed computer labs were refreshed.

Based on your feedback, we are beta testing a new service called MyMedia, powered by Kaltura. MyMedia is a video repository solution for campus that integrates seamlessly with D2L. The portal allows students, instructors, and staff to upload videos, record from a webcam, and even record a screen capture.

In addition to the services listed above, we’re excited to offer several new private cloud services from our OU IT Shared Services initiative. To learn more, please visit our Service Catalog at itservices.ou.edu

Lastly, we took a hard look into the operations of our services team and the support we provide to the campus community. In an effort to better meet the technology support needs across campus we are adding two service centers, one to our OU IT Store and one to the new OneU space in the Oklahoma Memorial Union. We are also aligning our phone support hours to better meet the demand of our actual calls and incidents. Our new phone support hours are 7am – 10pm Monday – Saturday and 12pm – 6pm Sunday. By allocating our coverage in this way, we can better respond to our customers during our peak times, while maintaining the coverage necessary to meet the needs of our customers in off peak times. By adding personnel, streamlining our processes, and getting our service and support closer to the users on a broad scale, we hope to bring a new level of service to all of our University customers.

Are there additional services you would like to see added to our portfolio? Do you have suggestions to improve technology on campus? Email itfeedback@ou.edu or call us at 405-325-HELP.