Technology Brief

"ULink" is shorthand for a family of computer accounts at the University of Louisville, and your ULink user name and password give you access to a range of UofL and Brandeis School of Law systems and resources, including:

Your ULink password synchronizes among these many systems, so changing your ULink password changes it for all.

What is your ULink user name?

ULink user names use elements of your full name—your first initial, middle initial, the first four letters of your last name—then end with at least two digits (beginning with "01"). For example, if John Wilkes Booth were a University of Louisville student or employee, his ULink user name would likely be jwboot01.

Once your ULink user name is established, it will never change. Never.

What is your ULink password?

The chart below explains how to determine your ULink password.

Password Policy

Your ULink password must meet all of the following conditions:

Password Assistance

The Brandeis School of Law IT staff can assist with simple ULink issues such as password resets or unlocking accounts, but more complex issues must be handled by University IT. Consequently, if you need assistance with your ULink account, contacting UofL IT’s Help Desk first offers the broadest range of support:

502-852-7997
louisville.edu/it/helpdesk

UofL IT has helpful information about password management on its website.

As a UofL employee, you have an Office 365 account, which you may access using any Web browser at office.com, using the following credentials:

• ulinkusername@louisville.edu
• ULink password

Office 365 includes online versions of Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneDrive and other collaboration and productivity software tools.

Whether you use your Office 365 account to communicate or collaborate with students and colleagues is entirely up to you. Be aware, though, that students may contact you at your UofL e-mail address, and some internal systems, such as Blackboard and PeopleSoft, will contact you at your UofL e-mail address. Consequently, if you do not plan to check your UofL e-mail account regularly, we recommend setting up automatic redirection to an outside account you do monitor. We can help you set that up.

UofL will deactivate your Office 365 account when your appointment as an adjunct professor ends.

Blackboard is the university’s official learning management system and makes it easy to communicate with students, among many other things it does. UofL creates Blackboard courses automatically each semester, and students enrolled in your class are automatically enrolled in your Blackboard class.

Recording Classes with Panopto

Integrated with Blackboard is Panopto, a class capture system for streaming or recording and posting your classes on Blackboard. Blackboard requires your ULink user name and password to log in.

For help using Blackboard, including videos tutorials:

1. Go to blackboard.louisville.edu
2. Click Help in the upper right
3. Click Instructor Help on the left

Every School of Law classroom features presentation technology, and most include:

• A Lenovo ThinkCentre computer with Microsoft Windows 10 and Office 365
• A VCR, DVD/VCR combo or Blu-ray player
• A document camera (i.e., "Elmo")
• One or more LCD or laser projectors and/or plasma displays
• Solstice Display, an application for connecting external devices wirelessly
• Connections for an external laptop, an auxiliary audio-video device plus electricity

Each classroom also features a collection of quick-start guides for using the presentation equipment, using Solstice Display to wireless connect and display external devices and recording classes using Panopto. If you'd like to know more about your particular classroom, we keep a detailed list of the specific equipment in each room, as well as each room's seating capacity and the status of its technology up to date.

The Hebel/JAVS Courtroom (Room LL77) features state of the art evidence presentation and audio-video transcription technology.

Portable Presentation Technologies

For use in the Allen Courtroom or other non-equipped locations, we also have portable audiovisual equipment, including one 86" and one 75" ViewSonic ViewBoard touchscreen computer, LCD projectors, laptop computers, document cameras and portable screens. Presentation remotes are also available for checkout in the Law Resource Center (Room 272). To reserve portable audiovisual equipment, please submit the Audiovisual Equipment Request Form.

To facilitate the secure administration of exams on computer, Brandeis School of Law licenses Extegrity’s Exam4, available for both PC and Mac, for every student. Students who wish to take exams on computer, except take-home exams, must use Exam4. However, students taking take-home exams may also use Exam4. The School of Law receives a new version of Exam4 at least once every semester, which students must download, install and test on their own laptops. The School of Law’s complete policy and procedures governing exams on computer is available in our Student Handbook.

Exam4, which is also used on the Kentucky Bar Exam, provides four exam modes:

• CLOSED, the default, locks the student out of everything else on his/her computer
• OPEN LAPTOP allows the student to access documents and other files on his/her computer or other local storage, such as a flash drive
• OPEN LAPTOP+NETWORK gives the student the same access as OPEN LAPTOP mode plus access to network resources, such as the World Wide Web; and
• TAKE HOME provides the same access as OPEN LAPTOP+NETWORK and also allows the student to end an exam session and resume it repeatedly until she/he is ready to submit.

In every mode, Exam4 also features a Multiple Choice tool for answering objective questions. If you ...

1. give an exam with objective questions,
2. require students to use the Multiple Choice tool and
3. provide us an answer key

Exam4 can grade those objective questions automatically and provide useful data on student response patterns, in addition to raw scores.

Syllabus Language

Whether students may take exams on their computers is up to each professor. However, because effectively all full-time faculty allow it, we urge you to indicate on your syllabus if you do not intend to allow your students to take your exam(s) on computer. If you do intend to allow students to use their computers to take your exam, please include the following language in your syllabus:

Exam Instruction Language

If you give an in-class exam on which students may use their computers, please include the following in your exam instructions: