Stop Wasting Your Time!

With the abundance of resources available to students and faculty at UDC — from the millions of print books to the electronic databases, digital archival materials, and e-books accessible through subscriptions and library purchases, not to forget the vast quantity of freely available content on the open web - it's a wonder that we aren't all drowning in a sea of information. But maybe we are....

The challenge we face is not a lack of information, instead it is how to navigate through too much information. We need to develop strategies that will help us to be productive and efficient in our information gathering. We also could benefit greatly from some tools to help us in the process.

After looking at half a dozen sources on the same topic, it can be very difficult to recall exactly which said what. Multiply this by at least ten for the typical graduate level research project. This is not a new problem, of course. Way back in the 1760s, Carl Linnaeus devised the system of notecards which were an essential part of the academic system of the twentieth century. One of the pros of the notecard was its easy accessibility: when you read or hear something, you just pull out a slip and write the information down. You can file the slips later and reorganize when desired.

We are now approaching 2013, however. Relying on a tool that is older than our nation might not be the wisest decision. Fortunately, we of the computer age have a better option.

Hopefully by now, most modern research work is done with a computer at hand — if not read right on a computer itself! The smart researcher of today takes advantage of this. With the free Zotero bibliographic citation software, you can create your own personal file of references (journal articles, books, webpages, whatever!). You can organize them, add notes to them, tag them with labels to group them, search through them — you can even include a full text snapshot of the source. Now even with a hundred (or a thousand) sources for a research project, you can quickly find the one you want.

Even better, Zotero integrates with Microsoft Word and will let you automatically insert references (footnotes or endnotes, in whatever citation style you wish) while you are writing your paper. It will then take all those references and create your bibliography — already formatted, already alphabetized. Zotero takes care of the details and lets you worry about what matters most — what you want to say in your paper.

After you try it, you will wish you had learned about Zotero sooner! Visit our Zotero guide where you can watch demo videos and get more information. Download the Zotero software and try it out! If you are interested in a free workshop, please contact us!

— Michael Fitzgerald, Electronic Services Librarian

Six Tips for online efficiency in the distance learning environment that will earn you praise

S. Suzan J. Harkness, ©2011

Presence: Be present on the days leading up to the start of your online class and every day the first week. Have a FAQ document posted on the course site and direct students to this memo to address common questions. Have some answers penned in advance for commonly asked questions and paste them into a reply. No need to create the wheel each time a student asks the same question as another.

Recycle: Use free resources to support your content and drive learning. Check out MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org); YouTube (http://youtube.com); C-SPAN Video Library (http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary); Wisconsin Online (http://www.wisc-online.com); Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org); MIT Open Courseware (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm); Carnegie Mellon Open Courses (http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/); and The Open University UK (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk).

Attendance: Take attendance several times during the first week of class to document student presence. Have discussion postings that are due such as a check-in or an introduction posting. This activity alerts you up-front who has checked-in and who has not. This documentation may be required by the registrar’s office for financial aid reasons and quickly tells you who you may need to contact.

Instructor’s schedule: Set up a schedule of when you will go online and respond to student’s questions and when you will hold virtual office hours. Set up assessments to be self-grading when appropriate, track student progress, and set-up dashboards that will alert students to their status.

Syllabus Quiz: Require students to read, ask questions, and take a quiz on the syllabus. This exercise provides students a chance to review and ask questions on the syllabus and exposes them to the assessment tools to be used later in the course, i.e. quizzes and assessments.

Expectations: Establish clear expectations and go over rules of engagement and conduct. This should be thought of as a pathway to success. Provide students with clear and concise information on policies, extra credit, how and where to get technical help, when and how to contact the professor, how assignments should be submitted, how to navigate the course site, appropriate and inappropriate postings, netiquette, how to use any mobile learning platforms, institutional resources such as online tutoring, a writing lab, disability services, and the instructors policy on submitting late work.

Organizing Research Efforts With Zotero

Those of us reading these words live in a world where information is plentiful. Whatever your search is, finding something isn’t such a challenge. The many subscription resources available to students and faculty at the University of the District of Columbia Learning Resources Division will give thousands and thousands of results. Finding the right thing can be more difficult. Sometimes it can feel like a full-time job just keeping track of all the information you need for the many projects you are working on each semester.

There are tools that can help researchers and scholars with this. Zotero is a free plug-in for the Firefox browser (no others at this point, but Firefox is free too!). It does three important things. It helps you collect different kinds of citations from a variety of sources all in one place; it lets you organize and annotate those citations; and it works with your word processor to create references and bibliographies, all formatted according to the style you choose. There’s much more it can do, but those are just the top three.

Wherever you find it — whether in the library catalog, one of our many subscription databases, or on Amazon, YouTube, or somewhere else — the information can be collected and stored in Zotero and will be ready for you to use later in papers and projects so you can cite your sources appropriately. Notecards were a good idea, but they are so last century. Zotero does all that and much more.

The award-winning Zotero software was developed by the Center for New Media and History at George Mason University, one of our partners in the Washington Research Library Consortium.

There’s more information available, including video tutorials on using Zotero. As part of its information literacy services, the UDC Learning Resources Division offers instruction on Zotero. If you are interested in a session, please fill out our online form. We look forward to helping you move forward with this cutting-edge tool.

Helping Students Master the Research Paper

As we approach the second half of the term, students may begin to fret about upcoming research papers and how to do them correctly. Writing papers and doing research can be one of the hardest tasks for students to master.  Because of the perceived difficulty, many students balk at the task or put it off.

Behavior such as this is unfortunate because research and writing are two skills that are mastered more easily through repetition. Moreover, strong analytical thinking and research abilities are proven job skills that will help a student land a good job upon graduation.

The Learning Resources Division (LRD) are partners with faculty to offer students assistance on the individual skills necessary for completing research papers. In short, students need to hone their skills around the following areas:

• Identifying resources and performing database searches
• Effective note taking and referencing the work of others
• Citation rules, formatting, constructing reference pages
• Editing drafts
• Using evidence to support the position or argument

Together, the University as a team can support the student journey toward skills development, the construction of knowledge, and the successful completion of course specific activities.

For more information about information literacy, visit our website - http://udc.libguides.com/infolit.

MOOCs: How to Ride the Disruptive Fracture

Introduction: Hundreds of thousands of students worldwide have flocked to enroll and participate in MOOCs, e.g. massive open online courses offered on collaborative networks such as Udacity, Coursera, edX, Udemy, and CourseSites. The courses offered are often generated within universities such Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology, Harvard, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Duke University, University of Michigan, UC Berkeley and others who combine open-source learning content, video lectures, discussion forums, artificial intelligence, and crowd-sourcing. While the courses often include much of the same content offered in the traditional face-to-face version, the free online courses are neither credit-bearing nor are they recognized to the same degree as traditional courses for which students attend in-person and pay tuition. The concept of a MOOC is not new, it has been around for about ten years, but only recently have MOOCs garnered attention to a wide degree in main-stream media. When elite branded institutions pool resources to generate new platforms as a way to flex their reputations and contribute to an effort to offer free education, the outcome could be disruptive.

At present, the MOOC model is in its early stages as educators reshape the landscape of higher education taking advantage of technology, advances in artificial intelligence and open-source course content. The MOOC model opens learning and college courses to anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world. In fact, enrollments in MOOCs have been especially popular outside of the United States. For example, MIT’s first MOOC is said to have enrolled 154,000 students from 160 countries – where only 15 percent of the learners were from within the United States. Officials at edX concluded that more than 7,000 of the enrolled students passed the course. As another example, during the fall 2012 semester, Coursera was scheduled to be offering 116 MOOCs from 16 universities in diverse disciplines such as medicine, philosophy and artificial intelligence during the fall 2012 semester. Coursera has already partnered with 33 colleges and universities and claims to have enrolled more than 1.3 million students world-wide. That said; opportunities exist to be part of the innovation and part of the disruptive economy.

The emerging landscape is open to innovators to take advantage of the shifting landscape. In a Moody report published in early October, Karen Kedem, VP and senior analyst predicts that regional universities that chiefly attract students from surrounding areas could use MOOCs to broaden their brand recognition if they offer MOOCs while at the same time the report offers a cautionary signal that MOOCs will most hurt the bottom line of low-cost local colleges, primarily commuter campuses, and for-profit colleges. “The real threat is when other institutions are providing credit for MOOCs and really overlapping with the demographics” Ms. Kedem said. Therefore, it is imperative that institutions think strategically to make institutional decisions about teaching, learning, competency, value, market, financials, and need as it related to online education, open source learning, competency-based models, and transfer credit options.

Given the movement of the MOOC arena, the opportunity exists for institutions to position themselves to become part of the paradigm. The Moody report observed that MOOCs are likely to impart at least six major credit effects, one being new revenue opportunities through fee-based services, e.g. licensing, degrees, proctored exams, certificates, or ads. A fee-based opportunity to offer a collegiate value for knowledge gained is transactional. Institutions as such could offer students a proctoring service to demonstrate course competencies in exchange for transfer credit on a fee-for-service model. Proctoring services would need to be secure and limited in scope as not to undermine an institution’s existing business model but expand it. Proctoring for transfer credit in a new and innovative fracture is likely to attract a revenue base while providing a service. In the short-term, institutions that already offer prior learning assessment, are liberal in transfer credit acceptance, and who have proctoring services on-site are most likely to step into the fracture and take advantage of new opportunities that MOOCs bring forward. Some in fact, have already done so in partnerships (See - Chronicle, Colorado State University Global Campus to accept transfer credit for courses on Udacity http://chronicle.com/article/A-First-for-Udacity-Transfer/134162/).

Another opportunity for the not so elite institutions are for faculty who are the campus rock stars to offer-up a MOOC as a means to bring attention to their fine scholarship and the institution as a whole. A successful MOOC from a small regional campus could bring much attention to the top-notch scholarship and teaching while at the same time opening the eyes of the MOOC participants to a campus they may not have ever heard of before. The opportunities are unfolding before our eyes – stay tuned and see where we are in one-years’ time!

Resources:

Kedem, Karen and John Puchalla. 2012. “Shifting Ground: Technology Begins to Alter Centuries-Old Business Model for Universities, Massive Open Online Courses Produce Mixed Credit Effects for the Higher Education Sector.” Moody’s Investor’s Service, September 12.

 

 

 

Start Your Search Right

It's not just students. When starting research, even professors and librarians are known to use Google (or another web search engine). Despite the availability of higher quality sources, the ease and convenience of that simple single search box is very appealing. Results come back (often in millions of hits!), and the searcher quickly starts to become aware of what has been written on that particular topic on a very broad scale.

One big problem, however, is that the resources that a web search returns are not all at the same level in terms of quality. The searcher needs to take time and effort to sift through and weed out what was written by a high school student for a class project from what was published in a reputable online journal with a peer review process. Remember, anyone can publish on the Internet - this is a good thing and a bad thing.

Another problem is that many (most?) of the very best results, in terms of academic work, are completely absent from a search of the open web. They are hidden in proprietary databases that collect millions of journal articles. These databases are generally only available by subscription - with very hefty pricetags that only a huge institution could afford.

It is the mission of libraries to collect these expensive but vital resources and to provide access to them for their authorized patrons. At UDC, this means current faculty, students, and staff (and on-site users regardless of affiliation). There are hundreds of such collections that can be found in our A-Z Resource List. But where to start? Which to choose? Searching in one generally means ignoring all the others, and to find books (not just articles) that cover your topic, you would need to search the library catalog too. And each of those databases has its own interface, each with just enough differences to confuse you. Ugh. That single Google search box is looking better and better.

But wait! A new service provides UDC patrons with a simple single search box that checks both the library catalog (for books) and an index of millions of articles, dissertations, conference proceedings, and more. It is not 100% complete and never will be, but to start your academic research, there is no better place. Why? Because it weeds out those low quality sites from the open web and includes the high quality hidden subscription-only content, and it returns relevant books side by side with journal articles. Just what your professor asked for!

We are now talking about web-scale discovery - just like with Google, you will probably get too many results, but those results are much higher quality, coming from those expensive subscription databases and the catalog of books that the library has collected. And it is easy to use the refinement facets on the left-hand side of the search results to pare down your results until you are finding only what you want. Try it and see!

• UDC's new web-scale discovery system

— Michael Fitzgerald, Electronic Services Librarian

Next time: how to collect and organize all those results

Best Practices: Deep Learning in Web 2.0 Digital Storytelling

Have you ever wondered how to you might use storytelling in the online or hybrid classroom? It’s a great pedagogical tool to facilitate deep learning while creating connections among students through the use of technology. Consider this:

Instead of asking students to post superficial comments about a topic or to one another, you might consider using digital storytelling to generate deep and authentic learning through reflective practice. Digital storytelling usually contains some blend of computer-based images, text, recorded audio narration, video clips and/or music. Digital stories vary in length, but like podcasting or audio discussions, should typically last between two and ten minutes.

Think about a more complex and effective way to get students engaged and reflective. By asking students to think about their own experiences and to use them in a constructive way to discuss their learning, you put the ownership of learning in their hands. As students reflect and generate their own story, making connections to content and their path toward knowledge, they become excited. This excitement grows after  their story is posted and others read it and make constructive comments.

The University of Houston has a rich Digital Storytelling web presence worth exploring. The have examples in math, Art,  Religion, as well as several other examples.

Other rich resources for Digital Storytelling include the Urban School of San Francisco,  and The Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) in Berkeley, California. CDS has compiled rich resources as well as its Seven Elements of Digital Storytelling, which are often cited as a useful starting point as you begin working with digital stories.

CDS' Seven Elements of Digital Storytelling

1. Point of View: What is the main point of the story and what is the perspective of the author?

2. A Dramatic Question: A key question that keeps the viewer's attention and will be answered by the end of the story.

3. Emotional Content: Serious issues that come alive in a personal and powerful way and connects the story to the audience.

4. The Gift of Your Voice: A way to personalize the story to help the audience understand the context.

5. The Power of the Soundtrack: Music or other sounds that support and embellish the storyline.

6. Economy: Using just enough content to tell the story without overloading the viewer.

7. Pacing: The rhythm of the story and how slowly or quickly it progresses.

Educause which also has its Seven Things You Should Know Series on Digital Storytelling (http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7021.pdf). Educause concludes that:

“Digital storytelling can serve as a bridge between these groups, encouraging a historian, for example, to delve into multimedia applications while exposing a computer scientist to the ideas of narrative through family lore. Creating and watching digital stories has the potential to increase the information literacy of a wide range of students. Moreover, digital stories are a natural fit for e-portfolios, allowing students not only to select representative artifacts from their academic careers but also to create compelling resources that demonstrate the student’s learning and growth.”

If you are up for something new, give it a try and check out these examples to help stimulate your development of digital storytelling assignments to help students learn deeply.

Collaborize Classroom Your Course

Blackboard, the UDC learning management system (LMS), provides a supportive discussion generation option that integrates properly with well-developed, online or hybrid courses. However, there are other discussion generation resources available that also compliment a variety of face-to-face, hybrid or online learning environments. Collaborize Classroom is one such resource you may wish to give a try.

 

Collaborize Classroom is a free, online stage for instructors and students to create structured discussions in a private online community. Collaborize classroom is different from the discussion feature in Blackboard because it allows users an ability to create different question types and/or display questions in an innovative manner.

One example is the “Vote or Suggest” style question in which instructors may ask students to comment on a particular topic. Other learners then have the option of voting for the answers they think are the most relevant and/or posting their own separate responses. This participation option is important because it provides students greater control over their learning process and makes them accountable for determining what constitutes valid knowledge.

Collaborize also provides a well-stocked topic library with hundreds of topics in the category “Higher Education” along with useful suggestions for discussion organization and facilitation.

Once a class discussion is completed, faculty can publish the results of the discussion to a results page. On the results page, the outcomes of student participation are published in an easy to read graphical format. There instructors can also add concluding remarks about the result of the discussion. Those results can then be fed back into other class activities that are face-to-face or online.

 





Collaborize classroom is not intended to replace Blackboard, but rather complement its functionality. The tool is free, private and secure. To learn more about Collaborize Classroom, go to:

http://www.collaborizeclassroom.com/features

Academic Integrity in Online Assessments

Now that we have gotten further into the semester, many of you may have considered  utilizing some of the online functionality of Blackboard to give quizzes or tests in Blackboard. This thought for some is not without  concern about the academic integrity of the online environment. While this is a valid concer, the medium (online) should not be the reason for the concern since many of the same expressed concers with cheating in online courses or assessments also exist in a face-to-face course. The major issue addressed in this post is to provide faculty with an online strategies to address the concern.

One of the solutions the University of the District of Columbia has secured is the use of Respondus LockDown Browser. Respondus LockDown Browser™ is a custom browser that locks down the testing environment within Blackboard or any other learning management system. When students use Respondus LockDown Browser they are unable to print, copy, go to another URL, or access other applications. When an assessment is started, students are locked into it until they submit it for grading.

There are two upcoming webinars on Respondus LockDown Browser.

Each session provides a 30-minute overview of the product features, followed by a question-answer period. These sessions are great opportunities for anyone who might be new to LockDown Browser to learn more.

Here are the dates and times:

Respondus LockDown Browser: Reduce Cheating During Online Tests (45 minutes)
Wednesday, September 26th at 4 pm ET — Register
Thursday, September 27th at 2 pm ET— Register

Ready for the Real World?

Life has no textbook.
As professors work to prepare university students for their futures outside the classroom, they should keep this in mind and strive to introduce students to a diverse set of materials. To be sure, textbooks are useful, as they gather information in one place and present a single coherent view of a subject. In the world of elementary and secondary education, this is acceptable. However, university graduates must be able to gather their own information and address the different perspectives found in those sources.
For students, having the freedom and responsibility to work independently is an essential part of higher education. Some professors might have worries, however. What if they do not use the right sources? What if they do not select the best bits for quotation or paraphrase? They must be taught, of course! Critical thinking skills are vital and this is what they should be learning here at the university. If they learn these skills, they will be better equipped to deal with the “real world” where an overflow of information — much of it biased — will rain down upon them. Would we rather have graduates who are overreliant on a single source?

Here at UDC, the Learning Resources Division is the strongest ally of professors and students. The mission of the university library is to collect, organize, and provide access to materials that support the mission of the university. Here is the gateway to the wider world of information. Here is a collection that has been carefully examined and selected.
How many of this semester’s assignments require your students to go beyond their textbooks? For the projects that do, have you set clear standards for the sources they should use? Have you explained how to evaluate sources? Have you yourself examined the library holdings in your discipline so that you know what is available? Remember that the Learning Resources Division welcomes the input of faculty regarding acquisitions.
Assignments that require students to make use of outside sources should also ask them to become familiar with the different formats and platforms that exist. Have all your students used an e-book? An archival database? A historical newspaper? A journal aggregator database? A streaming video collection? Now is the time to make them aware of these and to guide them to the appropriate resources for their assignments. LRD faculty and staff are here to assist, whether with in-class instruction, informal consultations at the level 5 reference desk or via chat or e-mail, or one-on-one tutorial sessions. See the link below for more information.
Future posts on this blog will highlight some of these resources and also examine strategies for discovering and collecting information in an organized way that avoids the haphazard approach used by many inexperienced information seekers.

• Request information literacy instruction
• Browse our A-Z Resource List

— Michael Fitzgerald, Electronic Services Librarian

Increasing Accessibility in Your Online Resources Series: Tip #1 

Over the next semester, the goal of this accessibility blog series will be to increase the capacity of all in the university community who work with students with disabilities to have knowledge about how technology can be used to support Universal Design. The impetus of the concept behind Universal Design is one that has a focus on eliminating barriers and this blog series will focus on those barriers in teaching and learning.

As faculty in higher education, there is always a need to think about alternative ways to make content available. One such way is to add voice to your PowerPoint is one way to increase the universal design of your lecture points. Adding a narration to your slides give students who may have a visual impairment an alternative method to access the core material of the lesson or subject material. One tool for adding this feature easily is through the use of Impactica.

 Using Impatica allows you add narration to your slide as well as decrease the size of your PowerPoint presentations before uploading them to Blackboard. By reducing the size of the files, you are able to load more presentations to your course.I n addition, the java feature of the software allows students to see the file in a web browser format which presents a more user friendly interface.

Impactica is available for all faculty and staff use in the elab 106 in Building 41. Come stop in and  use the software licenses on the computers to create more dynamic and engaging material for any of your courses or projects.

Quality Course Design

Good course design is essential to effective online learning. At the University of the District of Columbia, we follow the QualityMatters (QM) nationally benchmarked design standards. QM is a leader in quality assurance for online education and has received national recognition for its peer-based approach and continuous improvement in online education and student learning. The QM design standards utilize a rubric that is based in national standards of best practice, the research literature, and instructional design principles. The rubric and peer-review process are designed to assess courses with an eye to ensure that online and hybrid courses promote student learning.

The simplicity of the QM Rubric is that it follows eight key areas that guide the development of effective course design. The eight areas include: 1. Course Overview and Introduction; 2. Learning Objectives (Competencies); 3. Assessment and Measurement; 4. Instructional Materials; 5. Learner Interaction and Engagement; 6. Course Technology; 7. Learner Support; and 8. Accessibility.

The successes of Quality Matters have resulting in more than 500 institutions from around the world subscribing and implementing the review process. Simply put, the standards are easy to follow, logical, and effectual.

When instructors think about designing an online or hybrid course, we urge them to come to the Center for Academic Technology (CAT) to learn more about the QM design standards. Moreover, many of the standards are effective in designing a collaborative and well aligned face-to-face course. Several instructors have commented that after learning how to apply the standards, they implement many of the design principles into their traditional courses and have a deeper understanding of alignment and assessment.

Ten Tips for Onboarding Students to Blackboard

1. Prepare a trial week – A trial week is like a prequel to the real thing. Have students submit a faux assignment, take a mock quiz, use the journals or participate in a discussion board. You may elect to give a grade (pass/fail) for the assignment. If you elect to use a quiz, the quiz will usually just have a couple of multiple choice questions. The goal is for students to feel comfortable with Blackboard before the grades REALLY count.

2. Scaffold the usage of tools: Scaffolding is an educational term that refers to the purposeful sequencing of content and instruction. Therefore, before using wiki's in the classroom, you might want to first discuss how to write for the Internet (individual writing). Then perhaps move to discussion boards to practice how to comment and critique the ideas and words of others. Finally, introduce the wiki, which employs the aforementioned skills and adds another level of collaboration.

3. Use Screencasts to model web-based tool functionality: Screencasts are short videos which record your computer screen, mouse movements and voice. Screencasts are an effective way to model web-based tool functionality to students. You may also use them to review q quiz or explain an assignment. To learn more about Screencasts, check out Jing as a tool to product screencasts

4. Discuss pedagogy and learning/course objectives: If the students don't know WHY they are doing something, it's likely they won't do it well/correctly. Take the time to explain how the activities align to the expected learning objectives and how you will assess their learning. Make sure you provide adequate descriptions of activities to be performed on Blackboard.

5. Write concise instructions and descriptions: Never post an item without a description. Cite due dates, cite connections to the course and learning objectives, share what they should try to extract from the activity/reading/movie/PPT. Oftentimes, students JUMP right into Blackboard, the couple of sentences they spend reading your description before they open a file may be the only academic orientation they experience. Make it concise and to the point!

6. Use appropriate tools to drive learning: Use Blackboard tools in the class. Use podcasts, blogs, screencasts, wikis or voice memos to share information with the class. The more you use various tools, the greater your personal comfort level and more engaged the student will feel. The literature tells us that instructors who use technology tools as part of their instruction see greater learning outcomes than those who ask students to interact individually with web-based technology or applications.

7. Share your experiences with technology: Converse about Blackboard before complaining starts. Be open and honest with the students. The shared experience will build community. Also consider creating a discussion board that acts as a town hall or digital cafe. Allow students to post their comments, concerns, ideas, or simply vent. Be sure to participate in this discussion; the students will appreciate your presence and engagement.

8. Discuss academic integrity: It's so easy and tempting for students to plagiarize. Have an honest discussion about your expectations with the class. Also introduce SafeAssign, the Blackboard submission tool that checks for plagiarism.

9. Set ground rules for academic versus non-academic writing: Students should not treat Blackboard like it is Facebook or Instant Messaging. Be sure to set ground rules for what type of writing is acceptable for your class.

10. Blackboard support: Make sure that you acquaint your students to the Blackboard support office. Did you know UDC has 24/7/365 support for blackboard as well as staffed offices on the Van Ness and Community College Campus?

Face-to-face support is available on the Van Ness Campus, Building 41, Room 106 (Monday – Friday) and at 801 North Capitol Street, N.E. (LRD Office, 2^nd floor – Thursday and Friday).  

24/7/365 support is available by Telephone: 202-274-5665 or toll free: 877-736-2585; Online ticket submission or live chat - http://helpdesk.lrdudc.wrlc.org.