From 9:50am until 3:00pm on Tuesday, February 28, bCourses was intermittently unavailable to students and faculty. This unscheduled outage was caused by a large-scale Amazon Web Services hosting issue affecting many websites.
As of 3pm, Canvas reports that all known performance issues have been resolved. UC Berkeley and Canvas staff will continue monitoring bCourses for any further issues or downtime. More information on this outage is available at: http://status.instructure.com/
A flashy promo video invites you to apply to a conference where over 7000 participants gather to present, share, and network with like-minded individuals. It is billed as the “premier convening of IT professionals and technology providers across the diverse higher education landscape.” The keynote speakers promise to deliver inspirational talks that you will take with you back to your home institution. At the same time, panel presentations await that will invite you to stay on the cutting-edge for your school’s students and faculty.
Effective Fall 2017, UC Berkeley will be retiring the BlueJeans videoconferencing service (https://technology.berkeley.edu/news/changes-video-web-conferencing-services-2017). As a result of this change, ETS will remove the BlueJeans integration from bCourses after the Spring 2017 semester. More detailed information about the timeline for this process, and any new videoconferencing integrations for bCourses, will be announced later this year.
Beginning the week of 2/13/2017 ETS will be making changes to our website support process as we continue to develop our partnership with CSS-IT.
The start of a new year is a great time look back at the previous year. Below are some highlights on the progress that our team has achieved in supporting the UC Berkeley academic experience with responsive, essential, and innovative technology services. In 2017 we look forward to continuing support for students, faculty, and administrators in achieving their goals in our increasingly connected world.
Due to a CalCentral update, the following bCourses tools will be unavailable on Thursday, February 2, from 6-7am:
This will not affect other bCourses tools or functionality. Please reach out to bcourseshelp@berkeley.edu if you have any questions or experience any issues related to this outage.
Update, Wednesday January 25: Normal performance of the Create A Site and Official Sections has been restored. ETS staff are continuing to monitor for additional issues. Please contact bcourseshelp@berkeley.edu if you have any problems using these tools.
Update -- 10am, January 23: The fix for these issues was fully deployed over the weekend, and users should no longer experience errors when using the tools listed in this announcement. ETS will continue monitoring for any new errors or issues.
Update -- 11am, January 20: Error rates for the tools listed in this announcement have declined significantly; however, work on the full fix remains underway, and will be complete this evening (Friday 1/20).
Due to a CalCentral update, the following bCourses tools will be unavailable on Tuesday, January 17 starting at 6am, and could last up to two hours.
This email was sent on January 11, 2017 to instructors using or interested in using clickers.
Dear Clicker user:
This email was sent on December 2, 2016 to instructors using i>clickers.
Dear instructors using i>clicker this semester:
This email was sent on November 29, 2016 to all fall instructors.
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It has been a busy semester with lots of changes. We hope this quick list of things to do and to know before the end of the semester will help you finish this semester and start next year smoothly.
Educational Technology Services is committed to helping the campus reduce energy use during the winter break and will be participating in the campus-wide curtailment. Emails and requests received during this time will be answered in the order in which they were received when the campus reopens Tuesday, January 3, 2017.
