eClass Outage Wednesday January 2, 2013 - Thursday January 3, 2013

We would like to inform you that eClass (powered by Moodle) will be offline from Wednesday January 2, 2013 at 10:00 PM until Thursday January 3, 2013 at 12:00 PM. We will be using this outage to make important changes and perform the lengthy data migration to a new server hosting environment.

RESOLVED: eClass Email Notification Issue

As posted in IT Pulse, an issue with the eClass Moodle mail notification system was discovered this afternoon. CTL Tech services began investigating as soon as the issue was reported and we repaired the issue at approximately 4:30PM. Users will receive all the messages that have been queued up while the notification system was offline.

The incident details are posted on AICT’s IT Pulse incident report page: http://www.aict.ualberta.ca/itpulse/notifications/355-1497301

If you have any questions, please contact us at ctl@ualberta.ca.

Regards,
CTL Technology Services

eClass Moodle Home Page Changes

Dear eClass users,

You will notice some slight changes to your eClass Moodle home pages today.

First, the Using Moodle block will be moving to the Site home page, available through the second link in the Navigation block. The My home page is customizable so this move will free up screen space for users while retaining the important support and training information about eClass in the Using Moodle block.

Link to Site Home

Second, the eClass Archive server is now available through a right-hand block on both the My Home and Site Home pages. This service is only  for instructors and contains content archived from old eClass Blackboard Vista courses. The courses on eClass Archive are all read-only and are meant to allow instructors to preview their archived course content before migrating it forward into new Bear Tracks courses during the course creation process.

Link to eClass Archive

Please contact CTL at ctl@ualberta.ca if you have any questions about these changes or the new eClass Archive service.

Regards,
CTL Technology Services

eClass Moodle Slow Response

Users trying to access the eClass (Moodle) system may experience very slow page load times.

CTL is working with the AICT systems team to determine the cause of the issue and will be taking all necessary steps to improve system performance as soon as possible.

Our apologies for this inconvenience. Please contact us at ctl@ualberta.ca if you have any questions.

Regards,
CTL Technology Services

UPDATE: eClass Outage Cancelled

The outage previously scheduled for Tuesday August 28th, 2012 from 6PM until Wednesday August 29th, 2012 at 6AM has been cancelled.

We will be making the server hosting environment changes at a later date.

If you have any questions, please contact ctl@ualberta.ca.

Thank you for your patience.

Regards,
CTL Technology Services

eClass Outage Saturday August 18, 2012 - Sunday August 19, 2012

Dear eClass Users,

We would like to inform you that the eClass (Moodle and Blackboard Vista) systems will be offline this coming Saturday August 18, 2012 from 10PM until Sunday August 19th, 2012 at 12 Noon. We will be using this outage to make important changes to the server hosting environment.

Please do not schedule any activities for the LMS during this period. If you have any questions, please contact ctl@ualberta.ca.

Thank you for your patience.

Regards,
CTL Technology Services

Blackboard Vista (WebCT) Decommissioning

The transition to eClass powered by Moodle is now in the final stage - our license to Blackboard Vista (formerly WebCT) is expiring soon and all new courses are being run on eClass Moodle. On August 31, 2012, eClass Vista will be shutting down and all public access to the system will be removed.

All new courses on eClass must now be created on eClass Moodle. Courses can be requested online using the eClass Course Creation System

All course content from Blackboard Vista will be archived and converted to Moodle, which will be available in future terms as archived content. By mid-August, instructors will be able to access this content to preview it and request it during the Moodle course creation process. We recommend that instructors do not make any new content edits on Vista after August 1st as these changes will not be archived.

Please note that all static content will be archived, but student data (discussion posts, assignment/quiz submissions, Vista email messages etc) can not be migrated to Moodle.

We encourage all instructors who will be teaching a course in the next year to request your course as soon as possible so that your content can be reviewed while eClass Blackboard is still available. We also recommend that all users who are new to Moodle attend our upcoming training sessions. The training schedule for the next few months can be found here.

If you have any questions about the final stage of our transition to eClass Moodle, please contact us at ctl@ualberta.ca

CTL Tech Services

eClass Upgrade on July 2nd, 6 AM - Noon

We would like to inform you that the eClass (Moodle and Blackboard Vista) systems will be offline on Monday July 2nd, 2012 (Canada Day Holiday) from 6:00 AM to noon. We will be using this brief outage to upgrade Moodle to the newer version (2.2.3) and to add/improve a few of our Moodle plug-ins. The following features/improvements will be included with this upgrade:

Regards,
CTL Technology Services

Brief eClass Maintenance Outage on Thursday May 17th 2012

Dear eClass users,

We would like to inform you that the eClass (Moodle and Blackboard Vista) systems will be offline for about 10 minutes at 5:00 AM on Thursday, May 17th 2012. We will be using this brief outage to fix an urgent issue.

If you have any questions, please contact ctl@ualberta.ca. Thank you for your patience.

Regards,

CTL Technology Services

RESOLVED: Latest Safari Update Has problems with eClass Login

The latest update of Safari, version 5.1.4 released on March 12, 2012 causes some users to experience login issues when accessing eClass. The browser will get stuck in an infinite loop where it switches back and forth between the portal page and the weblogin page.

UPDATE: CTL Tech services team implemented a fix on our portal page to make it functional with the latest version of Safari.

Users can safely update their Safari to the latest version (5.1.5) without experiencing any further eClass login issues.

If you have any questions, please contact ctl@ualberta.ca.

CTL Tech Services