WordPress change announcement: In the coming week we will change sites.middlebury.edu and sites.miis.edu to use encrypted HTTPS for all browsing rather than letting sites be browsed under both HTTPS and unencrypted HTTP connections. This change will improve security for all users and is a prerequisite for an improved single-sign-on process.
All URLs will be automatically redirected to HTTPS version and the impact on the vast majority of sites should should be minimal. That said, with over 5,000 sites in the system there are likely cases where some browsers will block the inclusion of some content has been hard-coded to load using an HTTP URL. In these cases, the resolution is to update the embedded content to use https:// URLs instead of http:// URLs. Because of the scale of content in this system it is not possible for us to exhaustively audit all sites and pages. Users can test their own sites by navigating to the site and changing the address in their browser’s URL bar from http://sites.middlebury.edu/… to https://sites.middlebury.edu/… Please report any issues found or questions via a Help Desk ticket.
Everyone needs to be enrolled in the Green Mountain Higher Education Consortium’s (GMHEC) Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) in order to access our new Human Resources services on Oracle, which includes time entryand benefits.
By default, Canvas shows grade-distribution graphs to students. While this setting can be changed by instructors, it is buried under advanced course settings and not easy to find. Showing the grade-distribution in large classes may be fine, but in classes with only a few students it could expose student performance in obvious ways.
Beginning this week, when new Canvas sites are provisioned from the Course Hub we are now hiding the grade-distribution graphs by default. Instructors who wish to display grade-distribution graphs can update the course settings in Canvas to show the grade distribution graphs — only the default for new courses is changing.
This week we’ve upgraded WordPress to version 5.4 “Adderley” which includes many improvements to the “Gutenberg” block editor. You can read more about it in this release announcement.
Free/Reduced Cost Internet Access & Resources
With so many in our greater College community now working and studying from off-campus locations, we’d like to share information about free or reduced-cost Internet and WiFi options, along with some related resources.
