WAOL Blog

Audience: ELC & WAOL Instructors

Please share: For those colleges using WAOL ID Integration and those who have instructors teaching WAOL shared or private courses the Intent to Teach (ITT) forms are now available for Summer & Fall quarters.

Please note: Students cannot register for WAOL courses until the ITT forms have been submitted and approved.

Important dates: WAOL Summer enrollment opens on Wednesday, April 28th and Fall enrolment opens Wednesday, May 12th.

Instructions: How to fill out Intent to Teach Forms

Audience: Everyone with an interest in Angel should join us!

ANGEL Learning Community (ALC) in Elluminate @ 11am.
Open Forum -We welcome all questions

How: Join the THURSDAY sessions hosted by BTC and PC
The link for those sessions is:
http://tinyurl.com/yg3dkhl

Questions? Please contact:
Lesley Ann Wallace (lwallace@btc.ctc.edu) Eric Waterkotte (ericw@pcadmin.ctc.edu)
Jerry Lewis (jlweis@columbiabasin.edu) Scott Dennis(SDennis@sbctc.edu)

Audience: Registrars, SMS Coordinators, Distance Learning Council, HP3000 Administrators
 
From: Juanita Morgan, Student System Product Manager

You can now run SM6244J to post Winter quarter WAOL grades to the appropriate student records. You can run it immediate or in production. Any grades that were not submitted by instructors by the WAOL cutoff, will be emailed from WAOL to your college. Don’t forget:There are no parameters for this job.

• Check the exception report for any grades that may have been rejected.
• Running SM6244J posts the WAOL grades to student enrollment records, not to the transcript.  You still have to run the job to post grades to the transcript, just as you do with your college grades.

Please contact SBCTC-IT Customer Support at 425-803-9721 or support@sbctc.edu if you have questions.

Audience: All faculty, students and staff

What’s New/Task Hot Fix is now available in all domains in WAOL ANGEL.

Here’s the documentation that you can send to your faculty and students who use WAOL ANGEL (Changes to What New-Tasks)

WAOL staff rolled out the Hot Fix domain-by-domain over the last two weeks to make sure we did not see a degradation in performance as the function was restored.  So far we have not seen any related technical problems. 

If you do see any problems, however, please have your college domain administrator add information to this ANGEL support ticket:  #596-8313119

Background: When WAOL ANGEL experienced performance problems in January, ANGEL suggested we turn off the What’s New/Tasks feature since this feature was programmed to search every classroom or group for changes every time a user logs in.  We turned it off, and performance improved.  The cost, however, was high in that faculty and students lost very useful tools.  We asked ANGEL to provide What’s New/Tasks in a form that would work for our installation, and they did so by changing the What’s New/Tasks tool so it works on demand rather than running continuously.

We are sorry that this function was not available to faculty and students for several weeks this quarter, and we are glad that we now have all functions back.

Thanks for your patience and assistance as we worked toward this solution.

We’ve heard that there is some confusion about what the WAOL ANGEL collaborative tech support process looks like.  So we’ve put together a graphic that we hope makes it more clear. Click the link below to view the graphic (which is also available under  “Useful Links” in the sidebar)

Where2Go4ANGELSupport

Audience: All ANGEL users

What: WAOL ANGEL was offline for about 2 hours this morning due to a power loss at ANGEL hosting.  WAOL ANGEL is back up now.

The ANGEL datacenter lost power early this morning.
Tacoma elearning staff put in a ticket at 7:16 am.

• Some network gear at ANGEL blew while ANGEL was switching to back up power.
• The gear was replaced and full connectivity restored by 8:46 PST.
• This outage was caused by a power loss, and affected all ANGEL hosted customers; it is not related to the
• Service Pack applied to WAOL ANGEL last night.

Thanks to Tacoma and other colleges that reported the system down in the ANGEL Support Portal and Presidium.

Here’s the full report from ANGEL Managed Hosting:

Today our datacenter experienced a power outage which caused our network to fail over to fault tolerant devices.  Shortly after this failover, the environment had a power surge which physically damaged several networks switches.  As the other fault tolerant devices were without power and the fail over devices were damaged, we were not able to recover quickly.  We dispatched engineers to our datacenter and switched out the damaged devices as soon as possible to bring sites back up.   We sincerely apologize for the outage.  We are currently work with our data center to determine what happened to cause to power issues and to ensure an event like this cannot happen again. 
Thanks,
Mark Thompson
Managed Hosting

ANGEL hosting will apply Service Pack 5—January Update to WAOL  ANGEL on Friday morning, February 12,  during our regular maintenance period between 2:00 and 5:00 am.

• We do not anticipate any interruptions in service except during the maintenance time.
• This Service Pack will fix the No Name instructor issue we saw at the start of Winter quarter.

After this Service Pack is applied, announcements over 8000 characters will not be saved.  Please note that is 8000 characters, not words.  Pasting even a short announcement in from a Word doc can result in a very large number of characters since Word brings in formatting. 

Thanks,
Connie