Archive for January, 2010
WAOL ANGEL Update January 27, 2010
Audience: ELC, Faculty and ITC
ANGEL Update:
· WAOL ANGEL performance improved Tuesday after turning off What’s New Monday night.
· Thanks to Jerry Lewis and Brandy Long for materials to help instructors and students use the Task feature. Jerry’s video is on the log in page announcement.
· Brandy also tested sending a message to all faculty in the LWTC domain. Since no other domains reported getting the message, domain administrators can now send a message that will only go to their single domain (not everybody on WAOL ANGEL as before).
· ANGEL released Service Pack 5 for 7.4 today. It looks like there are some fixes there for bugs we have seen. As Gold-Hosted customers, WAOL ANGEL will apply this service pack during a regular maintenance period, which is every Friday between 2 and 5:00 am, BUT only after other customers have tested the updates. This is good because we won’t be the ones to find any bugs in the bug fixes. We’ll keep you informed on when ANGEL thinks it is safe to apply this update to WAOL ANGEL.
· An ANGEL Development team has begun to investigate alternatives to What’s New.
· ANGEL identified a way to find and delete additional and unneeded content that can be added when using a course cartridge. These files can be deleted to bring a classroom size down to a workable size. (We saw this same problem when instructors initially imported their classrooms from Blackboard.) Details and instructions will follow on how to delete this duplicated and unnecessary Blackboard cartridge content.
· ANGEL will also help us archive and delete old classrooms. We will discuss that at the next WAOL Advisory Group meeting on February 8.
Thanks, everyone, for all your help in keeping track of the current status for your users.
ANGEL What’s New Workaround
Angel’s “What’s New” function has been turned off due to performance issues. The “What’s New” function was what caused alerts/icons for new items/tasks to show up under your class listing on the home page. You can still access these features from within your classes:
- In the class, expand the Guide, then click on the “What’s New” or “Tasks” tabs.
- Click on the plus sign to expand the categories.
- Note that under Tasks, the categories may indicate zero (0) items when they actually exist. Expand the categories to see.
- Click here for a video created by Jerry Lewis of Columbia Basin on how to do this.
We are working with Blackboard to determine the problem and reactivate “What’s New,” however, in the mean-time, please use the workaround.
WAOL ANGEL What’s New OFF
Audience: ELC, Faculty and ITC
Update: ANGEL successfully disabled “What’s New” again last night, and they report improved performance of WAOL ANGEL.
WAOL staff will meet with ANGEL this morning to discuss how to configure What’s New so we can turn it on again.
If you get reports of slowness, please update the ticket with detailed information. Ticket # #596-8313119.
Elluminate Live! Recording – WAOL Advisory Group Meeting January 25, 2010
Audience: ELC and ITC
Here’s the WAOL Advisory Group meeting recording and PowerPoint from today’s meeting, Monday January 25th, 2010.
To view the recording, click the link below:
View the Elluminate Live! recording
ANGEL Update
Audience: ELC, Faculty and ITC
What’s New: The WAOL Advisory Group met Monday, January 25, and discussed the effects of re-enabling the “What’s New” feature in WAOL ANGEL. We turned What’s New on this morning at 9am and immediately saw degraded performance.
The Advisory Group voted unanimously that we should preserve performance over features, so we are asking ANGEL to disable What’s New again. The process to disable will be completed during the night to have the least effect on users.
We know that What’s New is a very useful tool. Tomorrow WAOL staff will be meeting with ANGEL staff to work on a way to configure What’s New so we can turn it back on without degrading system performance.
ANGEL Update
Audience: ELC and ITC
What’s New: SBCTC and ANGEL teams met yesterday and put plans in place to make the following technical updates. The intent of these updates is to (a) restore “What’s New” functionality and (b) clean-up old / bad data to reduce threats that may affect ANGEL performance.
“What’s New” Nugget
- Disabled Jan 14th per ANGEL recommendation. Performance improved.
- There have been considerable requests from College users to restore this feature, so SBCTC and ANGEL will re-enable “What’s New” on Monday, January 25 at 9:00am, PST.
- To reduce potential impact of re-enabling “What’s New” SBCTC and ANGEL staff will: a) Disable all WAOL ID courses prior to W10 (~8100 sections) b) Reset the nugget view mode to hide disabled courses – for all users c) Globally remove all announcements over 8000 characters in courses prior to W10. See item below.
- On Monday, January 25th SBCTC, ANGEL and Colleges will monitor performance and disable “What’s New” again if problems are reported.
- ANGEL’s longer-term recommendation is to build a custom version of “What’s New” that touches less data. SBCTC staff continues to work with ANGEL on this. Full discussions of options will happen in the WAOL Advisory Group meetings (every other Monday in Elluminate: next meeting Jan 25: 11am).
Bad Email Cleanup
- Remove email addresses identified as not active in order to reduce the number of exceptions log.
- Likely no performance improvement due to the relatively small number on active accounts (~300).
- No expected impact on current users.
Large Announcement Cleanup
- Large announcements are a known cause of performance problems in ANGEL.
- Some identified large announcements have already been removed by instructors.
- SBCTC staff will globally delete large announcements (>8000 chars) for regular courses prior to Winter ’10.
- Will notify ELC and post on blog before deletion.
Student Activity Log Cleanup
- ANGEL recommends removing this data for inactive courses.
- SBCTC staff will remove entries prior to Aug 1, 2009 – millions of records.
- Cleanup will be scheduled during a quieter system time (weekend), using best SQL practices for removing large number of rows.
- No expected impact on current users.
Please Help: Detailed information provided by you is extremely helpful. ANGEL Domain Admins – please continue to update the open ANGEL ticket (# 596-8312283). That information is seen immediately and is used by SBCTC, ANGEL and College teams.
Thank you.
Cable
Cable Green, PhD
eLearning Director
SBCTC
Spring Intent to Teach Forms Available
Audience: Faculty/ELC
Announcement: Spring Intent to Teach (ITT) forms are now available for colleges using WAOL course IDs.
Additional Information: For instructions on how to submit an ITT click here.
Large Course Announcement Cleanup
Audience: Faculty, ELC, ANGEL Administrators
What’s New: Large announcements will be removed from older courses Friday the 22nd. Any announcements over 8000 characters will be removed from regular sections. Winter 10 courses will not be affected.
What this means: This is part of an ongoing plan to manage the growth we’re seeing and maintain acceptable ANGEL performance
Old ANGEL Courses Being Disabled
Audience: All ANGEL Users
What’s New: WAOL has received a number of complaints recently about old classrooms showing up on student ANGEL home pages. WAOL will disable all old ANGEL Courses with WAOL ID’s. If a college wants to disable college-managed courses, please let us know. This action will remove the courses from the student account view yet still leave them accessible to faculty.
Additional Information: Instructors: To view all courses, disabled or active, mouse-over the title in the course nugget to get the edit button (looks like a pencil). Click the edit button to bring up a screen where you can enter any of your courses. Click on the title of any class to enter it.
College Domain Administrators: To disable college-managed courses:
- The college domain administrator can change the Member Access value, found on the Access tab in course details. It’s normally ‘All Members’ but when set to ‘Editors only,’ the course is disabled.
- Instructors can disable their own courses by entering the course, going to the Manage tab, clicking on the General Course Settings link and then the Access tab. Change the Member Access dropdown from “All Members” to “Editors Only.”
- WAOL staff can also disable a set of courses on request.
ANGEL Update
Audience: ELC, ITC, WACTC Technology Chair and IC IT Committee:
What’s New: First, the good news: We had a good meeting with ANGEL today. In addition, WashingtonOnline (WAOL) staff received only one report of ANGEL slowness today.
Here’s an update on the latest steps taken to resolve the intermittent WAOL ANGEL performance issue:
- On advice from ANGEL, the SBCTC team turned off “What’s New.” This feature can slow the system. We know that there is user demand to turn “What’s New” back on, and we are exploring with ANGEL how we can be turn it back on without causing system performance problems.
- Yesterday we turned the “Theme Selector” (allows users to change colors on their desktops) back on, as it was fixed in the 7.4 patch.
- WAOL staff completed the scheduled work today on the Domain Configuration. Now domain administrators have access they had in 7.3. Remember: All users must log in through the domain to which they belong.
- SBCTC network folks are in data collection mode – collecting data from you all (through ANGEL’s ticketing system), through an IT Director’s survey on network configuration, Presidium tickets, K-20 network monitoring, SurveyMonkey, and ANGEL traffic monitoring. From today’s meeting , I am confident that we have the right people involved and committed to pushing to a resolution for this problem.
- WAOL ANGEL college domain administrators: Please collect and report (through the ANGEL ticketing system) detailed information on any performance problems at your college. Detailed information about your users’ experiences is critical information in solving this issue.
- Thanks to everyone who completed the short survey on ANGEL performance. The data will be very useful. As I keep hearing from our technologists, please continue to provide us data and information about what you are experiencing at your college.
What’s Next: Brian Dahl and I will be updating ELC and ITC frequently. We will also be updating the WAOL Blog as information becomes available.
We continue to talk with the colleges and understand the frustration you, your faculty and your students are experiencing. Detailed information provided by you is extremely helpful.
Thank you and them for your continued patience,
Cable
Cable Green, PhD
eLearning Director
SBCTC
