Computing & Information Services | Brown University

Wikis provide groups within the Brown community to collaborate in online wiki-spaces. Wiki-spaces are made up of a collection of interconnected webpages and attachments.

Online Course Reserves Access (OCRA) is a service used to place books and other physical media on reserve and to create electronic reserves: links to ebooks and other online content, digitization of articles, book chapters, full-length movies, short video clips, and audio files. Links to reserves in all formats can be added to a MyCourses site.

MyCourses is Brown's implementation of the Blackboard Learn course management system (formerly WebCT). MyCourses is accessed via a web browser and has a collection of built-in tools for uploading of content, communication, collaboration, assignments and assessments.

iTunes U @ Brown provides course support for the aggregation, organization and distribution of multimedia through the iTunes platform. The service allows instructors and students to upload and share media content including video, audio, and PDF documents. Using the service, course materials can be downloaded to personal iPods and iPhones for use anywhere.

iClicker personal response systems (PRS) are handheld radio-frequency response devices that allow anonymous and specific polling and question-and-answer sessions in the classroom. The device transmits student responses to a receiver attached to an instructor's computer. The results can be displayed to the students or kept private.

Digitization services are available for personal slide collections, photos, videos, audio cassettes, text (OCR and PDF) which will be used for faculty and graduate student teaching, presentations and research. Content is prepared according to Brown Library standards, and full quality archival copies are made whenever needed.

SmartBoards are interactive whiteboards which allow instructors to annotate computer presentations including PowerPoint during their lectures, saving the presentation with the notes. The annotated presentations can be made available to students for review outside of class or saved for future use by faculty.

A Class Discussion List provides instructors with an email address that sends mail to their class roster. The Class Discussion List may be used for two-way email discussion between instructors and students in a course.

The Class Announcement List and Bulk Email service enables instructors to send one way (no-reply) email messages to their students. This service is also used by high level University offices to send official email communications to large, specified segments of the University population.