Modern Times (More Tales from Davis)

The old tech never went down

From Inside Higher Ed:

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Learning Management System Outage at UC Davis

Submitted by Carl Straumsheim on May 31, 2016. A weekend maintenance period turned into a week-long learning management system outage last week at the University of California at Davis, leaving faculty members and students worried they would not be able to finish finals. The university, which uses a version of Sakai it calls SmartSite, was on Thursday, May 19th, notified by its hosting company that the system would be down for maintenance that weekend. A week later, however, the system had still not been restored, and the outage threatened to affect finals, held during the second week of June. The news was first reported by the ed-tech blog e-Literate.

"[T]his is the system we're supposed to be using to download/view class information, upload assignments, etc.," a member of the university's Reddit community wrote. "Some of my classes don't even have textbooks -- the materials are all posted in PDF or links on SmartSite. We're doing midterms and are a couple of weeks away from finals!"

The system was restored on Friday, though administrators warned they were "not certain of the system’s reliability, support and capacity," and that the system would "be open for viewing and downloading course materials only" -- not uploading. On Saturday, the university tweeted the system was up and running. The university has previously announced plans to move to Canvas, the learning management system developed by Instructure.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/05/31/learning-management-system-outage-uc-davis

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