Archive for September, 2008
Regarding Weekend Blackboard Trouble
We received this from Blackboard regarding the connectivity trouble over this past weekend:
Subject: Blackboard ASP -General_Announcement
General Announcement: Dear Valued Customer,
Yesterday and today, we received a number of calls from clients concerning connectivity issues to their Managed Hosting environments. Many of these have been narrowed down to routing via your Comcast Internet Service Provider.
We have made adjustments to bypass the preferred provider we believe is the bottleneck in routing the packets to and from the end users. We have received feedback that clients have seen improvement in doing this.
Earlier, we made attempts to assist all clients affected by reaching out and working with Comcast directly. Comcast requested that each client call and submit a ticket with their specific client information to assist in the troubleshooting process.
At this time, we believe our modifications have corrected the situation. If your ISP is Comcast, and you continue to experience issues with sporadic connectivity, you can log an issue with Comcast directly or submit a ticket to us and we will troubleshoot accordingly.
Thank you,
Blackboard Client Support
Add comment September 30, 2008
WAOL Council Meeting; Sept. 22nd recording
The meeting was conducted in Elluminate.
To view the recording, click the link below:
Add comment September 23, 2008
ANGEL/Elluminate Updates
The first meeting of the WAOL Council on September 8 gave us some good feedback and information. Here’s the link to the ELC wiki:
http://wadlc.wikispaces.com/WAOL+Council+Home
And the link to the archived session of the September 8th meeting:
View the Elluminate Live! recording
Elluminate:
· We have enabled accounts for six colleges so far. In the process, we discovered a few things that need clarification:
o The user ID must be in all caps.
o The option for technical support for administrators when they call Elluminate has changed from “4” to “2.”
o Use of WAOL Elluminate is FREE, unlimited and available to anyone in our system. You do not have to use WAOL to deliver courses to use WAOL Elluminate.
o Elluminate can be integrated with Blackboard. We will not integrate with WAOL Blackboard since WAOL is moving off Blackboard this year. If a college wants to integrate the WAOL Elluminate with the college Blackboard, they can do so. Here’s the link to information on that Building Block: http://www.elluminate.com/blackboard_building_block.jsp
o Training is free and through Elluminate. We require training of the college Elluminate administrator, and we suggest colleges require training of anyone who gets an account through a college. When you sign up for the training for Elluminate, they ask you to create an account. That account is with Elluminate for their training registration, and WAOL has no access to it nor will lit give a person access to WAOL Elluminate.
ANGEL:
· ANGEL sandboxes—To this point we have asked people to get sandboxes from ANGEL rather than from WAOL so that they can receive support from ANGEL. We will be creating accounts in WAOL ANGEL in the next few weeks. We will create an account for everyone who already has an account on WAOL Blackboard, and we will also have a procedure to create accounts for people who are new to WAOL.
· 13 classrooms will be delivered Fall 08 on the WAOL ANGEL production server.
· Those classrooms can continue on ANGEL Winter 09. We will also be able to support additional classrooms during Winter 09.
· WAOL System-Owned Shared courses will be moved to ANGEL for Winter 09. Undetermined other college courses will be tested as well; however, our first goal for Winter is to test the WAOL integration processes.
· Blackboard to ANGEL training materials are under development and will be available in October. Boyoung Chae is doing this work now that Jane McCarville is working at NIC.
· The Blackboard to ANGEL migration plan has two phases, and WAOL staff are focused right now on Phase One.
o Phase One: Successfully replicate what WAOL does right now on Blackboard
o Phase Two: Create processes and access so colleges can manage ANGEL in their own domains.
Next Meeting:
· The WAOL Council will meet every other week in Elluminate. The next meeting is at 11:00 on Monday, September 22.
· Anyone is welcome; however, meeting information will go to the ELC listserv. Please forward to others on your campus.
Discussion and documents are at the ELC wiki http://wadlc.wikispaces.com/WAOL+Council+Home
Other information on Elluminate and ANGEL are on waol.org: http://www.waol.org/faculty_and_staff/angel_migration.aspx
Add comment September 15, 2008
Media Server online
WashingtonOnline is now offering a media server to online instructional staff. A media server allows faculty to add classroom materials in the form of video, audio and other large files into online classrooms, for viewing or download by students. The main goal is to help ease the classroom size restrictions and allow more supplementary materials to be offered. (Classrooms hosted by WashingtonOnline have limits as to the total size
of files and other course content that they may contain. Most courses don’t come near these limits but a few do and would benefit from more storage space.)
To use, ELC and faculty may login to the WAOL.org website and choose the new Media Server Upload or Search links. These pages have some usage and other help information.
More info on the purpose and design of this new system can be found here:
Media Server Overview
2 comments September 5, 2008
WAOL Elluminate Documentation
As you know, the State Board purchased an unlimited license for Elluminate for the system colleges this July. The license is managed by the WashingtonOnline office, and we are now ready for colleges to begin to use Elluminate on their campuses. We have created an administrator account for each college that can be activated when the elearning director tells us that the designated college administrator has taken the required online training from Elluminate. We are using the honor system, so all we need is a phone call or email once the required training is complete.
The documentation below provides information designed for the college administrator and technical staff rather than for the individual users at a college.
Elluminate Documentation for Administrators
Elluminate Documentation for State Board Staff
Mark Carbon is the Elluminate Manager for the WAOL license and will be the chief support for college administrators. In addition, Monique Kovalenko and Brook Bane are trained to provide support and are ready to practice in Elluminate sessions as we all learn how to use it. We have had a lot of fun learning to use Elluminate in the WAOL office, and we hope you find it to be a useful tool at your colleges. Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback.
1 comment September 2, 2008
