Faculty, Welcome back for spring 2021! I wanted to pass on some important updates before the semester begins: Piazza site changes: Attached is a note from the Stearns Center about changes to the Piazza site, used by many of you. The most important take-aways are specific set-up instructions to access the correct license and to tell your students they should not feel obligated to pay anything to Piazza. GMU is discussing purchasing a site license in the near future. Please remember to block student self-enrollment and faculty self-enrollment. Matlab site license: We now have a campus site license that allows students to install it on their own computers. ITS has not yet updated their help site so please direct your students to https://www.mathworks.com/academia/tah-portal/george-mason-university-31483444.html to obtain their license and to request help from [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>. You can also use the Matlab grader to build assignments linked to Blackboard. Qualtrics: We have a campus license for Qualtrics – please refer any requests to me so I can create the account. Open labs: As in the fall, we have opened ENGR 1505 as a spill-over open lab given the safe distancing capacity of 1506. Hours are on our site at http://labs.vse.gmu.edu Student access to VSE systems and software: We have changed several systems – please refer your students to the FAQs on our site (http://labs.vse.gmu.edu) for instructions to access our systems and to download VSE-specific software. We have posted sample instruction paragraphs in the Faculty FAQs on that site to help. Chairs – please relay this to your adjuncts. Please contact me if you have any questions. Jonathan ================================================================== Jonathan Goldman, PhD Director, IT & Security Volgenau School of Engineering George Mason University (703) 993-3506