News

Update, 9:30am: Canvas is reporting 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/.

If you experience any issues, please contact us.

For the students, staff, faculty, and administrators of the University of California (UC), the six Regents meetings that take place throughout the year are crucially important. With 10 campuses across California, technology plays a key role in making these meetings accessible to as many of the UC’s stakeholders as possible. Live-streaming and posting the Regents deliberations to the web means the events can be accessed in dorm rooms and offices across our Golden State and anyone with a phone screen or a laptop can stay up-to-date with the high-level decisions affecting them.

Moffit Library is a hub of campus energy and ideas, and if the newly renovated upstairs feels like a tech start-up, the new basement feels like Steve Jobs’ garage in the 21st century with the introduction of a student makerspace. As a free-to-use, collaborative, and community-operated space, it serves anyone on the Berkeley campus interested in the cutting-edge technology of 3D printing and fabrication.

Campus announces important changes to the legacy course capture content found at webcast.berkeley.edu

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.

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).