All University Information Services - Digital Literacy Skills courses

This self-paced hands-on course gives a "quick start" introduction to Microsoft PowerPoint which is a widely used software application for preparing presentations

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.

This course is aimed at those new to programming, or who have never been formally taught the principles and basic concepts of programming. It provides an introduction to the basic concepts common to most high level languages (including Python, Java, Fortran, C, C++, Visual Basic). The aim of the course is to equip attendees with the background knowledge and confidence necessary to tackle many on-line and printed programming tutorials. It may also help attendees in deciding which programming language is suitable for their programming task.

Knowledge of the concepts presented in this course is a pre-requisite for many of the other courses in the Scientific Computing series of courses (although not for the "Python for Absolute Beginners" course).

Do you want to create more professional publications by having a deeper appreciation of what Publisher can do for you? Through a series of graded exercises this course focuses on practical work giving you ample opportunity to use your PC skills to produce various publications. Please note that this course is largely about learning the software rather than design.

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series and is suitable for people who have Python experience equivalent to either of the introductory courses: Introduction for Absolute Beginners or Introduction for Programmers

These sessions consist of a selection of self-paced mini-courses, each taking at most a half-day. Python expert(s) from the UCS will be present to answer questions or address difficulties with these. Attendees can select from the available topics to most closely meet their individual needs. Attendees are welcome to attend more than one session to work through multiple topics. If an attendee finishes a topic with time to spare they may select another, and so on.

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.

This course is aimed at those new to programming and provides an introduction to programming using Python, focussing on scientific programming. This course is probably unsuitable for those with programming experience, even if it is just in shell scripting or Matlab-like programs. By the end of this course, attendees should be able to write simple Python programs and to understand more complex Python programs written by others.

As this course is part of the Scientific Computing series, the examples chosen are of most relevance to scientific programming.

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.

This full-day course introduces the Python programming language to those who are already familiar with another high level programing language such as C/C++, Fortran, Java, Perl or Visual Basic. The aim of this course is to give such programmers sufficient familiarity with Python that they can attend any of the more advanced Python courses organised by the Computing service and easily follow any of the widely available Python tutorials on the more complex aspects of the language.

This course covers all the material contained in the "Programming: Python for Absolute Beginners" course, but in a more abbreviated fashion suitable for those who already have significant programming experience. This course does NOT cover the more complex aspects of the language (for such topics see the other Computing Service Python courses), nor is there much explicit discussion of the object oriented features of Python.

If you are an accomplished and experienced programmer you may find this course too slow, you may prefer to self-teach the course rather than attend in person, the full set of notes can be downloaded.

This course is for those who are new to the Recruitment Administration System (RAS) or those who wish to have a refresher.

• This is the In Person Face to Face version of the Live Online RAS course.

Please Note: It is important that when you book on this course, on your booking confirmation page, click on Add to Calendar to start the process to import the course appointment into your calendar.

• See Related Courses below to take your skills further

This course is for those who are new to the Recruitment Administration System (RAS) or those who wish to have a refresher.

• This is the Live online version of the In Person Face to Face classroom based instructor led course.

Please note that the course is taught using Microsoft Teams and you must have Teams installed on your computer to participate. See System requirements below for more information

Please Note: It is important that when you book on this course, on your booking confirmation page, click on Add to Calendar to start the process to import the course appointment into your calendar. This contains the link to the MS Teams course meeting under Joining Instructions that you will use to join on the day of the course.

• See Related Courses below to take your skills further

This course gives a simple introduction to organizing your data in a relational database. It aims to explain the arranging of your data. It does not deal with specific relational databases systems such as Access, Oracle or SQL Server, or the technical tools that you would or could use to set up your database. The course aims to provide you with enough information to sit down and design your database, regardless of the database product that you intend to use. Exercises will be done on paper, without using computers.

Please Note: To add this event to your calendar, on your booking confirmation page, click Add to Calendar .

• See Related Courses below to take your skills further

• The Faculty of Education has recently adopted the University’s new room booking system Booker, and would like to invite you to a briefing session to learn more about the system.

• Booker is a free, user-friendly, quick and robust cloud-based service that provides an effective means of managing rooms within any Department and also promotes the sharing of available room space. It’s part of the Education Space project being run by Professor Graham Virgo to improve the space utilisation within the University and to provide a uniform approach to the booking of rooms, both within departments and across University sites.

• The Faculty of Education is hosting a briefing session during which the Booker team will provide a short demonstration of the system and its capabilities and you’ll be able to put questions both to the team and to current users of the system.

• Refreshments will be provided at 10:00. The presentation will begin at 10:30.

Countless busy professionals are now turning to speech recognition to speed up creating documents and streamlining their workflow.

This course will focus on how to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking for education to improve accuracy and will show you how to customise the software for your writing style.

The aim of this course is to teach you how to achieve 99% accuracy with Dragon NaturallySpeaking so that you spend less time correcting mis-recognitions and more time dictating text at speeds of up to 140 words per minute!

With Dragon you are only limited to the speed you can think - come and learn how get Dragon working for you!

See success stories of how Dragon is being used by education.

This is free introductory training on using the SCOPUS abstract and citation database, created by the professional academic trainers at SCOPUS and selected for curation by UIS training staff.

You can access the training here

Use your Raven password to access the SCOPUS reference database

After some years of dominance by packages owned by the Thomson Reuters organisation, the number of options available for managing references and inserting formatted reference citations into documents has expanded considerably. This course aims to provide a basic over-view which will assist you to select one which is best suited to your scholarly interests and field of work.

Coverage of packages is not intended to be exhaustive but you should come away with a broad-brush idea of what reference management software can and can't do to assist your work and the strengths and weaknesses of some of the most common ones.

This course is for IT Support Staff who may support users of Exchange Online. It will describe the mechanisms for migrations from Hermes and an on-premise Exchange service. The practical exercises will cover a range of operating systems and mail clients.

Please note that this is a one day course with two sessions and a break to lunch.

Using the Parallel Computing capabilities in MATLAB allows you to take advantage of additional hardware resources that may be available either locally on your desktop or on clusters and clouds. By using more hardware, you can reduce the cycle time for your workflow and solve computationally- and data-intensive problems faster.

In this seminar, we will discuss a range of workflows available to scale MATLAB applications with minimal changes to your MATLAB code and without needing to learn any shell or scheduler programming syntax.

University Information Services (UIS) and the TechLink coordinators are hosting an IT forum event for Lent Term. During the afternoon we'll highlight some important UIS updates from a variety of divisions and in addition, you'll hear from some external speakers of tech expertise.

University Information Services (UIS) and the TechLink coordinators are hosting a second IT forum event. The afternoon event will cover UIS updates from the Infrastructure and DevOps Divisions and a representative from Dell.

• 14:15-14:25: Introduction to IT Portfolios. Mark Rowland will give a brief overview of what the Portfolios are and who in the University is responsible for each element.

• 14:25-14:55: The UIS Accessibility Working Group will update on work going on to ensure that we provide accessible services. They will highlight plans for institutions that will need to adapt to review the accessibility of their own websites and services and to write accessibility statements. There'll be a demo of screen reading technology working with inaccessible materials, and the difference that a few relatively simple updates can make to improve the experience for all.

• 14:55-15:05: Rich Wareham from UIS DevOps will share what UIS's technology staff hope to achieve by starting a new Community of Practice following a recent unconference event.

• 15:05-15:15: Break

• 15:15-15:50: Phoenix Software (our Microsoft Office365 partners) will update on some of the shared Office 365 experience across the University, including how some institutions are using Mimecast, such as for GDPR compliance. - POSTPONED

• 15:50-16:00: The recent Oxford IT Forum Conference was another excellent combination of talks and workshops, and vendor interaction. Brief highlights of the day will be provided by Ronald Haynes, along with ideas about further expanding our collaborative IT efforts with Oxford.

• 16:00-16:30: Celebratory refreshments -This will be the final seminar of this academic year, and as usual, there will be some light refreshments to celebrate the end-of-term!

• A presentation and workshop-style session introducing how IT works in the University of Cambridge. Covering what is expected of an IT professional working within a college, department or University institution, this session will explain what resources are available for them, including IT-specific material.
• This induction is useful for any new (or relatively new) IT staff, or as a refresher for those who may have missed the opportunity to attend at the start of their IT role within the University.
• The session will provide the opportunity to network with IT professionals across the University, and to meet UIS staff and Relationship Managers who are key contacts for supporting IT staff.

The Research Computing Services division has recently launched a new service which provides infrastructure as a service (IaaS) capability. The service provides instant high-performance compute, storage, network resources and other functionality. It helps to avoid the expense and complexity of buying and managing your own physical servers and other data centre infrastructure. It enables IT practitioners and research groups to build their own scalable platforms that fit their exact needs and requirements. More information can be found here https://www.hpc.cam.ac.uk/research-computing-cloud-services

The research Computing Services team will present Research Computing Cloud service capabilities and details about the platform that the service is built on. There also will be a live demo of the platform and a Q&A session.

The Research Computing Services team will provide an update on some recent and engaging developments by the division, including:

• An overview of current CSD3 (Cambridge Service for Data-Driven Discovery) platforms as well as some key news about planned upgrades in the forthcoming months.
• The Data Accelerator - high performance, all-flash ephemeral storage for a new kind of scratch tier. New storage offering for the most demanding science workloads.
• Bare metal cloud with Openstack - taking a peek into the future of the research computing infrastructure.
• Secure Research Computing Platform - Using OpenStack, GitlabTerraform, Ansible to deliver secure (and movable) computing environments. Includes a demonstration.

There will also be a brief TechLink Community update, including an overview of a developing joint pilot for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) with Cambridge, Oxford, Glasgow, Edinburgh (COGENT).

Handling the large volume of spam, ransomware and other malware delivered via email to often indignant users has become quite a large part of standard IT duties over the past few years. Along with the increasing complexity of the tricks and techniques used by hacker groups for spearphishing and delivering malware, it is clearly apparent that there is only so much that professional IT staff can expect from their users in terms of determining what is, and is not, malware or phishing.

Yet the pressure on often relatively junior administrative and financial staff has not decreased and the time taken to try and work out what is genuine and what is not does not make for smooth time management. Most important of all, IT practitioners must not indulge in the blame culture when an incident happens, simply because the person blamed will probably never "own up" to making a possible mistake again. A positive culture - even admitting "Yes, it has happened to me" - is essential to encourage users to be open about mistakes.

This seminar will attempt to show some of the more common of the latest spammer tricks, and introduce some tools which (hopefully) will make your life easier.

Induction Day for new IT Staff

This day-long session introduces how IT works in the University of Cambridge, its idiosyncrasies and governance, what is expected of an IT professional working within the collegiate university and what resources are available for them. It covers IT specific material and does not duplicate the PPD Introductory Conference. The programme for the day is:

9:00-9:30 Registration

9:30-9:50 Welcome to Cambridge

9:50-10:30 IT within the University

10:30-10:50 Coffee

10:50-11:30 The user

11:30-12:10 The network

12:10-13:30 Lunch — representatives from various service groups will be milling around to talk to

13:30-14:10 Your responsibilities

14:10-14:50 University-wide services

14:50-15:10 Coffee

15:10-15:50 Building the IT community

15:50-16:00 Conclusion and End

Kieren Lovell and Dr David Modic, from the Computer Laboratory, will be presenting on the most common attack vectors for Social Engineering, and connecting the research to practical advice for Researchers and Staff travelling to areas of increased risk.

As an experiment, we are looking to run this event in webinar format. Joining instructions will be e-mailed to those that have signed up by 11am on the day.

Bob Dowling will be talking about Blue, the UIS' Active Directory, what options it creates for Institutional IT staff and plans for further development.