WAOL Blog

WAOL Advisory Group Meeting & Canvas Migration Update; May 14

waol — Wed, 16 May 2012 23:43:16 +0000

Audience: eLearning Coordinators

Meeting Overview:

2012 Meeting Schedule
State Authorization Issue
Blackboard Collaborate Check-in
Tegrity Check-in
ANGEL Check-in
Canvas Update
eLearning Community
Open Course Library Update

Go directly to the recording with this link.

View the PowerPoint slides.

A summary of Canvas Migration Implementation:

For complete answers attend the Advisory Group Meeting.

Timeline:

Early Adopters have been selected
Early Adopter defined as those who want to test heavily Fall then go all-in Winter (next group, test heavily Winter, all-in Spring)
July 1st for Contract to be signed
May 28th – Finalize training content
Establish Dev/test site for training and user testing to take place
10+ for Winter 2013 (depending on how smooth Fall goes perhaps more)
6 or more for Spring 2013
Timeline potentially sped up if all goes well

It will be an FTE based model.
It will be cheaper than the $4 an active user we have in place now.
There are conversations taking place about making it part of the core technology at the SBCTC which would make it free to the colleges.
ANGEL is in place through 2014
*Once Canvas is turned on your 1st year (discounted) rate begins. (what the actual discount is, is in the works right now.)

WAOL Advisory Group Meeting; April 30 Recording

waol — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 21:50:52 +0000

Audience: eLearning Coordinators

Meeting Overview:

2012 Meeting Schedule
Behind the Blackboard Info
State Authorization Issue
Blackboard Collaborate Check-in
Tegrity Check-in
ANGEL Check-in
Canvas Update
eLearning Community
Open Course Library Update

Go directly to the recording with this link.

View the PowerPoint slides.

ANGEL Infrastructure Maintenance: Friday, May 4

waol — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:32:23 +0000

Who: All ANGEL Users

Notice regarding ANGEL downtime:

“On Friday, May 4, 2012, from 10 pm PST to 2 am PST, Blackboard Managed Hosting, Indianapolis, will be conducting systems upgrades and doing preventive maintenance on our ANGEL infrastructure. Because of the nature and scope of the maintenance, all users will be impacted to some degree during part or all of the window. This type of maintenance and the times cannot be changed. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience that this may cause, but we do hope that the advance notice will give you plenty of time to plan accordingly.”

WAOL Advisory Group Meeting; April 16 Recording

waol — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 21:50:52 +0000

Audience: eLearning Coordinators

Meeting Overview:

2012 Meeting Schedule
State Authorization Issue
Budget Update
Blackboard Collaborate Check-in
Tegrity Check-in
ANGEL Check-in
Canvas Update
eLearning Community
Open Course Library Update

Go directly to the recording with this link.

View the PowerPoint slides.

WAOL Advisory Group Meeting; April 2nd Recording

waol — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:45:56 +0000

Audience: eLearning Coordinators

Meeting Overview:

2012 Meeting Schedule
State Authorization Issue
Blackboard Collaborate Check-in
Tegrity Check-in
ANGEL Check-in
New LMS Announcement
eLearning Community
Open Course Library Update

Go directly to the recording with this link.

View the PowerPoint slides.

WAOL Advisory Group Meeting; March 19th Recording

waol — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 21:39:49 +0000

Audience: eLearning Coordinators

Meeting Overview:

2012 Meeting Schedule
State Authorization Issue
Blackboard Collaborate Check-in
Tegrity Check-in
ANGEL Check-in
LMS RFP
eLearning Community
Open Course Library Update

Go directly to the recording with this link.

View the PowerPoint slides.

ANGEL Status Update

waol — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 22:05:18 +0000

The State Board administrators met today with ANGEL staff, including the Hosting and Software Solutions teams. Unfortunately there was no new information on what caused the outage and they’re increasing the monitoring to try to pick out the cause.

Some notes:

We had a performance incident again today from roughly 10am to 11am.
No database logging was captured as they’d targeted 9am and nothing happened then. It takes time to start up the logging, and can’t be run constantly because of the volume of data involved.

Going Forward – Tonight and this weekend:

API logging will be enabled, to look at the actual traffic that the ANGEL API is getting. (This is used by our Secure Logon, College SSO and our LMS Integration.
They’ll do periodic database logging to try to capture a problem period.
Tonight they’re restarting our web servers – one at a time, so as to not impact performance.
Continuing to review external and internal systems that may be causing these spikes in load.

WAOL ANGEL Downtime: Thursday, March 15

waol — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:52:46 +0000

WAOL ANGEL will be down starting at 3:00am PDT Thursday morning, March 15. The outage will likely last 2-3 hours.

Blackboard Hosting ran tests this morning and found problems in our mail and discussion forum data. They think this may be causing our performance issues and have proposed a maintenance window as soon as possible to do a full re-index of our database. This repair work cannot be done when users are on the system, so they will take our ANGEL installation offline.

Blackboard Hosting is very aware of the difficult timing. While we hope this work will fix the problems, if you continue to see performance problems tomorrow morning, please add to the existing ticket: 01486774

WAOL Winter 2012 Shared Course Instruction Ends Today

waol — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:17:34 +0000

WAOL winter grades for ALL shared courses are due next Monday, March 19th, and need to be submitted no later than midnight or they do not get recorded and sent off to the students’ enrolling colleges.

Student access to their ANGEL winter classrooms will be turned off on Wednesday, March 21st. If there are any grade changes that need to be made after March 19th they will need to be emailed directly to our office. We will then make the change in the WAOL Winter 2012 database and send them off to the appropriate college.

Click here for instructions on Web Grading and here for assigning an Incomplete Grade in a WAOL course.

Any grade changes made after March 19th, must be sent to: Monique Kovalenko (mkovalenko@sbctc.edu) and Brook Bane (bbane@sbctc.edu)

Update: WAOL.org downtime

waol — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:00:06 +0000

Audience: All WAOL.org users

When: Thursday 3/8/2012 9am

WAOL.org will be offline for maintenance starting tomorrow morning at 9amcontinuing until noon. Three hours is the maximum downtime and we hope that the work will be completed more quickly.
During the cutover, the following services will be degraded or unavailable:

WAOL.org – all site pages will be offline
ANGEL Secure Log On - ANGEL logons will work as usual but the nugget will fallback to the standard ANGEL logon mode
MyWAOL Nugget for Faculty – unavailable * College Portal SSO – Paul will distribute backup accounts to affected schools, so they can operate during the cutover

These sites or services will continue to operate:

LMS Integration – no expected downtime for the P310 sync or SMS-ANGEL Integration, although the web management UI will be offline
Site24x7 system monitoring
WAOL Blog
Online Writing Lab at owl.waol.org