Resources for Access Technology

03/11/20

Dear Colleagues,

As indicated in my communication regarding research-related COVID-19 considerations sent on Tuesday, offices across the School and University are working hard to ensure research efforts proceed without disruption, operating as they do every day to support our community.  This includes the infrastructure and technology necessary to support remote working, teaching, learning, and conferencing.

I wanted to highlight some important resources:

Video Conferencing:

Penn subscribes to BlueJeans, which is a cloud-based cross platform video conferencing service.  You can access via this link with your PennKey username and password.  For detailed instructions, please see here.  If you would like your video conference supported, moderated, and/or recorded (non-HIPAA and Non-Intellectual Property information for upload), or if you have any questions, please contact the Media Technology & Production (MTP) Services. 

Skype for Business is supported by Penn Information Systems & Computing (ISC).  Please click here for more information.

Recording Talks or Lectures:

The Jordan Medical Education Center is equipped with a two-camera television studio and video production facility featuring virtual sets, live broadcast options and high quality audio/video services.  The MTP team can pre-record courses, lectures, and seminar series and post to the Mediasite platform for video-on-demand. 

In addition, please visit the Center for Teaching & Learning and the Online Learning Initiative, which provides resources and strategies to guide our faculty in remote teaching.

Please see here for a list of School of Medicine building locations and rooms where BlueJeans and Mediasite are supported.

Collaboration Tools:

If you have not already, begin saving shared files on Penn+Box, a cloud-based collaboration service for securely managing and sharing files and folders, both within the Penn community and externally.  Consult your PMACS local service provider with questions.

Slack is used by many labs to keep conversations organized and accessible from anywhere, anytime. 

In addition, while not officially supported by the School, we are also aware of others utilizing the following platforms: Gotomeeting, Zoom, and Webex.

Lastly, the Office of the Vice Provost for Research is maintaining a suite of resources to support the Penn Community, which you can find here.

My thanks to our various offices for their tireless efforts and to you all for your cooperation and agility, especially in this ever-changing situation.

All best,
Jon

Jon Epstein, MD
EVD/CSO