Frequently Asked Questions

A wiki is a special type of website that can be edited easily and quickly. They are excellent collaboration tools. You decide who is allowed to view and/or edit the pages in your wiki. This short video on YouTube called "Wikis in Plain English" will give you a general explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY

myCourses is a course management system, organized in a particular way with a standard set of navigation bars containing components such as content, discussion, classlist, gradebook and quizzes. Most RIT students are familiar with myCourses. Some activities that myCourses is best suited for include threaded discussion, emailing students from the classlist, organization of course content, online quizzing and gradebook.

Wikis are websites that can be organized and designed to suit a variety of needs. There is no standard for navigation, other than child pages, so faculty will need to spend some amount of time deciding how students will navigate their wiki. Wiki structure often grows organically and will tend to change over time. A small percentage of students at RIT are familiar with wikis. Some activities that wikis are best suited for include group collaboration on text documents, team projects, building knowledge bases, any activity that involves many people coming together to incrementally improve a body of knowledge.

Faculty & Staff: https://wiki.rit.edu/display/ritwiki/Wiki+Request+Form

Students: Student clubs and organizations that would like to use the RIT Confluence wiki will need a faculty sponsor to submit the wiki request form on their behalf. The faculty sponsor must also maintain oversight of the space once created. All student club & organization requests will be reviewed by Academic Technology Support before being approved. Individual student wiki spaces are not available at this time.

If you request a course-related wiki, you will be asked to provide your course number so that Academic Technology Support can add your students to the wiki space when it is created. Students will be added through the course LDAP group, which means that if a student drops/adds the course, the group access will be updated automatically. A link to your wiki can also be added to the navigation bar in your myCourses shell.

Yes, we encourage reuse of wiki spaces from one quarter to the next. You can add/remove/change user permissions at any point in time.

No, there is no expiration date for your wiki. At the end of the fiscal year, you will be contacted and asked if your wiki is still in use. If it is still in use, it will remain available. If it is no longer in use, the pages will be archived, and the space deleted.

If you are an RIT faculty member and you would like to request technical assistance, or schedule time for a one-to-one training session on how to use the Confluence wiki for course-related assignments and activities, please contact Academic Technology Support at online@rit.edu. Training sessions can be requested using Academic Technology Support's one-to-one training request form.

One-to-one trainings may also be available to staff on a case-by-case basis, however one-to-one training sessions are not available to students at this time.

Students using the wiki should seek instructions from their professor, faculty/staff sponsor, or utilize the online user documentation.

With any technology you assume the risk of encountering some minor technical problems, bugs, or glitches. If you find a "bug" in the Confluence wiki, please report it via email to Academic Technology Support (online@rit.edu). ATS will look into the issue once it has been reported, and if necessary, contact Atlassian regarding the problem. You will be able to track the status of your reported bug on our Known Bugs page.

In addition, Confluence users often post information about potential bugs (as well as new features in Confluence) to the Confluence user forums on the Atlassian website. If you'd like to check out the forums, you can find them here: http://forums.atlassian.com/forum.jspa?forumID=96

There is also a Confluence Developer's blog, which can be found here: http://blogs.atlassian.com/developer/confluence/