laptops in group study rooms

Instructions for connecting in the group study rooms -- It is also available on the web by navigating to the Systems area, Computing Resources, Student Use Computing, and reading the section on the Group study rooms (link below)

http://www.nelson.usf.edu/systems/studentareas.html

SPSS printing output

I was baffled by the occasional difficulty that some students would have in getting prints of their SPSS outputs when they would copy paste sections of the output into Word. I have learned that if you copy / paste SPSS output charts into Excel, they print out beautifully.

saving Word documents

In the past week, I have had two students, working on Word documents, who encountered saving problems. When they go to Save As, nothing happens, no menu to select location or name the file. Copy/pasting the content to a new Word doc did not help. There is something going on with the program and once it does this, it will not allow anything to be saved. (In both cases, the student opened a file that they sent themselves via email but we don’t know if that is part of the problem. You should be able to open a file from email and then save as to the temp storage space in any case.)

In order to save what they had done, I highlighted and pasted the contents into Word Pad. I was then able to save (as) the file. So far, Word Pad has done a good job of maintaining some formatting and embedded graphs as well.

When it happened a second time (different students, different PC), Berrie was available. We saved the work as a Word Pad file as a safety precaution. Then Berrie closed down the Word program completely. When asked if he wanted to save the material on the CLIP BOARD, he selected YES. After Word was completely shut down, he opened a new Word session and new document. He tried to save as, this time successfully. He then was able to paste the content saved on the clipboard into the new document and saved the file again successfully.

Primary documents

Links to primary document sites for history:
http://www.nelson.usf.edu/reference/subject_guides/AS/history/encyclopedias.html

ACL software

ACL software is available on all students computers, under programs.

Finding SWOT analyses

I recently received a notice that Gale’s Business & Company Resource database has added “hundreds of SWOT analyses” to their resource. As far as I can tell, this is a feature that will be included in our subscription. To see an example, search for Microsoft and look at the blue “download S.W.O.T.” button. SWOT analyses are often requested by business students.

Student evaluations of instructors

There are sometimes questions about accessing course evaluations for instructors since the paper copies are no longer printed and there has been a gap since about 2005. If students ask about access to course evaluations, feel free to pass along these links:

http://usfweb3.usf.edu/fair/Custom/usf/EvaluationMart/EvaluationSearch.aspx

https://usfweb2.usf.edu/fair/annualreport/student_eval_report.asp

I do not think that one must be logged on to FAIR to gain access.

As an FYI, distance ed courses may have a lower percentage of returns than traditional face-to-face classes because distant ed students do their reviews online rather than on scanned paper forms.