Distance Education Team (DE) of the School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI) is dedicated to providing excellent information technology and support services to SBMI students and faculty.
DE is available during business hours (9 A.M. to 6 P.M. Central Standard Time). Requests sent in after 6 P.M. will be answered during the next business day. If you have an urgent technical problem please note that Canvas, Proctorio, GotoMeeting and Turnitin all have their own 24/7 support hotlines.
→ If you're an SBMI instructor please visit our Educational Technology for Instructors Page.
Canvas is the official learning management system at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. The majority of SBMI courses will be hosted out of Canvas including the New Student Orientation.
All SBMI students are responsible for making sure they have access to the required computing resources to attend SBMI classes.
Per UTHealth policies, all online assessments contributing to a student's grade must be proctored. SBMI employs Proctorio as its primary and only source of proctoring services for online assessments.
Proctorio is an on-demand online proctoring service integrated into our learning management system: Canvas. There's no need to create an account, schedule appointments, pay for individual assessment attempts nor to purchase hardware or software. Proctorio relies on the student's computer webcam and microphone to monitor assessments on an on-demand basis.
Turnitin is a plagiarism prevention software that is integrated in Canvas. Turnitin automatically analyzes, scores and provides originality reports for submissions to assignments in Canvas. SBMI instructors also access the same originality reports during the assignment grading process.
SBMI students may optionally choose to request a private account for Turnitin to check the originality of their papers prior to submission or for checking other academic work. Please send an email to de@uth.tmc.edu to request a Turnitin account.
→ Turnitin Student Quickstart Guide.
Panopto is an online platform for sharing lectures, classroom recordings and narrated presentations. It allows both instructors and students to record, manage and share video content in Canvas courses. Panopto is available to all UTHealth students and faculty.
Students can also access Panopto through the "Panopto Recordings" link in a Canvas course. Please refer to Panopto documentation in both the New Student Orientation and the introduction modules of your Canvas courses for more information.
All synchronous online classes, office hours and online meetings are held over Citrix GotoMeeting teleconferencing software. Participants of GotoMeeting events do not need to apply for accounts or access. Simply use the link provided by your instructor or meeting organizer. GotoMeeting does not require software or license purchases and installs quickly on the user's computer or mobile device.
GotoMeeting Essential is a limited version of GotoMeeting for SBMI students that hosts a maximum of six participants and is intended for class or group meetings. SBMI Instructors may on occasion request GotoMeeting Essential accounts for all students in a class.
Office 365 Education is a cloud-based service which provides access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and additional productivity tools. Students and teachers at UTH can download Microsoft Office 365 Education for personal use on no more than 5 personal, non-UTHealth devices.
Using your Office 365 account, you can also access OneDrive which is managed by UTHealth and accessible via most browsers. With OneDrive, you can log in and access Office documents from any computer at any location.
SBMI Virtual Campus in Second Life, a virtual environment for teaching and learning, contains the SBMI Virtual Health Clinic, a virtual linear accelerator simulation, classrooms, breakout spaces, information about our school and plenty of other spaces to explore.
Second Life may be used in some courses for virtual class sessions, office hours and assignments.
Qualtrics is a secure, web-based survey tool that is available to all UTHealth students, faculty and staff. Users can create unlimited surveys, collect unlimited responses, and generate reports. Survey templates using school color scheme and logo are provided.
DE Team assembled the following quick reference page for data analysis software. Several of these software titles are free and others may be purchased directly from the software publisher by students.
DE also recommends the following free online tools that may be helpful to SBMI students for their coursework.
Even when using third party tools, please continue to comply with the best practices and IT policies issued by UTHealth.
UTHealth SecureStor is a cloud based storage system that makes it possible to store, access and share files and folders from a computer desktop, web browser and mobile device. UTHealth students, faculty and staff can log into to SecureStor with their UTHealth ID and password. UTHealth SecureStor can store all data classifications including HIPAA.
UTH Share is UTHealth's implementation of Google Apps for Education, excluding Gmail. HIPAA data is not allowed on UTH Share!
Secure Wireless Access is available to SBMI students on UCT floors 6, 8 and 14. All students can log in with their UTHealth ID and password. An unsecured guest access network with limited connectivity is available for visitors' convenience.
Students can find software programs such as Microsoft Office and Adobe products at discount prices at the UTHealth Bookstores.
This presentation introduces all of TMC Library's services and resources, including information about where to find research databases and how to locate full text articles. All SBMI students with a TMC Library card can use the free InterLibrary Loan Service to request photocopies and materials from another library for free.
Many SBMI classes culminate with a poster presentation at the end of the semester. Every semester, the poster session gives students the opportunity to present their projects with both their fellow colleagues and SBMI learning and research community. Posters with the best content and presentation are awarded a prize.
SBMI offers free plotter printing services to our students presenting in SBMI poster sessions. Additional posters for other occasions may be printed for a fee.
Posters are 40 inches wide on a heavyweight matte poster paper or a semi-gloss poster paper. Large-format posters will be created with the poster template rather than separate PowerPoint slides. To schedule a print, contact sbmiweb@uth.tmc.edu.
Please allow DE staff 24 hours to print your poster.
To discuss poster dimensions and for template questions, email sbmiweb@uth.tmc.edu. For consultations or special print jobs, students must schedule a time with media lab staff the week before the scheduled poster session. Posters are printed on a first come, first serve basis.