It is just going by too fast. Summers usually do, of course. But with year-end reports, budget issues, year-ahead goals, summer institutes, new online class designs, new workshops to write, new software to learn… Seems we hardly got started. Only one more full week before school starts. I swear.
DATA INTEGRATION SNAFU. Earlier this week, we had a Blackboard-Archway Data Integration problem. When the data integration process was reset after software updates on network down day, two database fields were set back to default status: 1. course availability (default is NO) and 2. course title (default is Archway title field). In short, we turned off all courses and changed their titles back to Archway titles.
No content was lost, of course. All the courses are still there. Just all Yes/No switches on whether or not to appear on students’ screens have all been set to No. (sigh)
The good news for us–this occurred during one of the only two weeks of the year when there are just a handful of classes going on. So we have time to let folks know about the problem before the high-stakes first week of classes begins, when 500 classes will be live and 1,500 to 2,000 students will be logging in each day.
Of course, Chris immediately sent out an email to all instructors explaining the situation, apologizing for it, and reminding folks how to turn their classes back on. But we’ll be hitting this again. No question, first day of class there will be dozens of folks asking, “Where’s My Class?”
UPDATES. Chris has been especially busy this week, preparing for and conducting the pre-semester series of Blackboard workshops. Last I heard, she has 44 registered seats in a four-day set, which began yesterday and continues through next week. She’s been putting in some pretty long hours. Wednesday morning she was here when I got here and still here when I left sometime after 8:00 pm.
I was here late because I was participating in an online Webinar describing and discussing the Leadership in Global Enterprise program.
For the past couple of days, Anita has been working with E-Beam. She’s been learning about, supporting, trouble-shooting, and showing some faculty members how to use this interactive whiteboard classroom technology.
In my next post, I plan to write a little on a recent report put out by the Chronicle of Higher Education–“The Student of 2020.” We had an interesting discussion about it in a Deans and Directors retreat this past week.
