Online Teaching

We have renewed our access to Atomic Learning for this coming year as our pilot proved its usefulness to our instructors, students, and staff. Atomic Learning provides training on over 110 of the most commonly used software applications, such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro, Photoshop and many more for either the Mac or PC platform. Atomic Learning delivers a library of thousands of short, easy-to-view-and-understand tutorial movies that can be used as an integral part of a professional development program, a valuable curriculum supplement and an anytime/anywhere software training resource. In fact, you will find some training videos for software that our campus does not support and hence you will be limited to Atomic Learning as your resource for those tools.

How to access Atomic Learning:

OIT and Library staff have worked with Atomic Learning to allow both on and off campus access from all UMass Amherst students, staff and instructors.When on campus [or dialing in to campus with a modem] using UMass Amherst internet access:

The standard url for connecting is — http://www.atomiclearning.com/highed

When off campus using other internet access: http://silk.library.umass.edu:2048/login/atomiclearning

Off campus, you will be prompted for your UMass NetID and password, then after a brief redirect which happens automatically and should take only a few seconds you should be at Atomic Learning’s home page for the University of Massachusetts. Although most people have successfully used this off-campus link, there are some who cannot get in.

Of those who are unable to connect from off-campus, we think most are coming from computers behind firewalls or other secured networks that have blocked port 2048. The user must be able to get through port 2048 to connect to our proxy server which is set to port 2048. Please let us know if you are experiencing access problems.

Questions:

See Atomic Learning’s support page for the Atomic Toolkit and getting started tutorials.Atomic Learning will field questions from end-users on using Atomic Learning and troubles with Atomic Learning, via online form, email and phone support (9 am to 6 pm EDT).

From their support page:Use the online form to submit a question
Phone us at 866 259-6890, extension 8
Email us at cs@atomiclearning.com

Atomic Learning will be the official support provider for this learning tool, but the Learning Commons and Technical Support Desk located on the Lower Level of the W. E. B. Du Bois Library will also try to assist you with the software packages that we do support.

We hope you find this a useful IT resource.Please feel free to send your comments and evaluations of these tutorials to Richard Rogers in the Provost’s Office [ rogers@provost.umass.edu ].

We have purchased access to Atomic Learning for this semester—from now to May 31, 2008—to test its usefulness to our instructors, students, and staff. Atomic Learning provides training on over 110 of the most commonly used software applications, such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro, Photoshop and many more for either the Mac or PC platform. Atomic Learning delivers a library of thousands of short, easy-to-view-and-understand tutorial movies that can be used as an integral part of a professional development program, a valuable curriculum supplement and an anytime/anywhere software training resource. In fact, you will find some training videos for software that our campus does not support and hence you will be limited to Atomic Learning as your resource for those tools.