Newly Updated CAIT Articles
Updates from CAIT
Templates in Canvas

Is your Canvas course site feeling text heavy or wish your site had a bit more visual flair?
Course templates are complete course designs available to import into a course site. Templates include placeholders for a home page, syllabus, content page, discussion, assignment, or quiz, to name a few elements.
Why use the CalArts Template?
Using a course template helps you to design an engaging student experience by turning an empty course into a fill-in-the-blank exercise. Templates also help break down complex content with intuitive layouts and visuals in a consistent format.
How do I use a template?
Importing a template to your course is easy! This page guides you through importing the content to your course and basic setup.
Cybersecurity

CAIT cares deeply about the security and privacy of your data and we’ve been working hard to improve our cybersecurity position. We have engaged with an outside firm for not only consulting but for better visibility into our network, searching for malicious behavior. This brings a wealth of knowledge to our environment that we simply did not have before. Moving forward, we will be working with departments and schools to deploy these new tools in order to create a true umbrella of safe computing over CalArts.
CAIT Strategic Plan

CAIT has been working on a divisional Strategic Plan for the past 3 months. We are excited to announce that it is now published and available online. This 3 year plan outlines our vision and mission statements, our core values, and strategic priorities as we move into the next phase of our operations and goals. We thank the community for its support of our initiatives and efforts.
Vision statement: Offering transformative and progressive solutions that help to support the education of the next generation of artists and savvy citizens.
Newly Completed Projects
Don’t forget to visit our CAIT Project Updates page for the latest look at all the things we’re up to and how they are going. We’ve been and are busy serving the CalArts community!
Digital Signage

CalArts IT has deployed digital signage on campus that allows departments and schools to display information for students. Infrastructure Operations coordinated wiring, power, and TV mounting, while Customer Engagement has been working with constituents on providing access to the tool used to control what is displayed on the TVs.
Self-Service Changes

We’ve made a number of notable additions to Self-Service for faculty, staff, and students. We added the ability to update address, phone and email information via the User Profile and moved HubTime over (the existing system is out of date and no longer supported). All employees can now enter, submit, and approve timesheets and view tax information, pay advices, and leave balances all in a clean and more streamlined interface.
Staff Refresh

Computers need to be refreshed every few years as they become too slow and outdated to be able to expediently run the latest software and operating systems. CAIT maintains a schedule and runs computer refreshes on that schedule. A computer refresh entails replacing the old computers with new computers and installing the latest secure versions of the operating system and software applications. As part of the staff computer refresh, CAIT updated staff computers in HR, Registrar, Accounting, Library, and Provost departments with brand new computers and updated software.
Students Domain

Starting with Fall 2023, new CalArts students will receive emails under our new students.calarts.edu domain. Previously, all students received alum.calarts.edu addresses. CAIT made this change to better serve the student community and to ease management of accounts. This does mean that the community will need to potentially email johnsmith@alum.calarts.edu and janedoe@students.calarts.edu when contacting students. An alternative for faculty is to use the messaging system in Canvas, which has automatic enrollment.
CAIT By The Numbers (Fall 2022)
Canvas and Panopto
- Over 200 courses published
- Over 1400 students and faculty used Canvas
- Over 1 million page views in Canvas
- 2 months of video created and watched in Panopto
Tickets
- 4039 tickets created
- 4038 tickets resolved
- 99.3% user satisfaction
- 2889 tickets resolved by Customer Care team
- Most tickets in a day: Monday
- Most tickets in an hour: 11am-12pm
Reminders from CAIT
Stay Safe Online

CAIT takes your data security and privacy seriously and we continue our efforts to improve our operations and policies. We wish to remind you of the importance of password management and the ways to check whether your email or phone has already been part of a data breach.
Despite its humorous name, Have I Been Pwned is a powerful tool for awareness of your digital footprint. As your phone number or email address may have been part of a past breach, it is important to ensure that you are managing your passwords by using unique passwords and strong passphrases where you can.
In order to make unique passwords more manageable, we urge you to consider using a password manager. Software solutions include 1Password (which CAIT uses internally) or ones built into your browser or operating system.
Give These Tools a Try!
Slack
Slack is a great communications tool that is available to the whole campus. Part chat, part email-replacement, and completely awesome, Slack lets you work with others in an efficient manner. Group chat, direct message, and share files all in one spot. Sign up and get started today at calarts.slack.com.
For more information on how to use Slack, check out Getting Started with Slack on the CAIT website.
Panopto

Panopto is a new video management system (VMS, but it also supports audio) that provides valuable alternative storage for media other than Google Drive or network storage. It’s kind of like CalArts YouTube, but with much more granular access control, automated captions (for searching and accessibility), and tight integration with Zoom and Canvas. Note that we’ll be decreasing our Zoom retention period now that Panopto is available as a storage location for those recordings.
Comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.