Important – Rollover 2010

Dear Colleagues,

Please note that, while this announcement is targetted toward staff using Blackboard, students should also make themselves aware of this process.

This is the first in a series of communications to inform you of the process to ‘rollover’ the VLE from the current academic year to 2010/2011. After ‘rollover’ you will no longer have access to your 2009/2010 course areas and will have 2010/2011 areas created for you.

This process will take place at the end of summer after the resit exams. We plan for the VLE to be offline for five days from 23rd of August to the 27th. In practice the process usually takes at most three days.

The date for Rollover is aligned with the College calender which is available here: http://www.arcs.qmul.ac.uk/examinations/calendar/calender.html

What is Rollover?

Rollover is essentially our ‘cleaning house’ on the VLE. Basically we backup existing course areas, take them off the system and replace them with fresh areas for the new year. These fresh areas will have the files and structure of the previous ones but all student-generated data will be removed to make room for the new cohort.

Last year we also used the Rollover process to update staff access to online course areas. We will not be carrying out this specific task on a yearly basis and will not require that information from you this year.

Do however be aware that we are investigating methods to make use of the new SIS system as it comes online and this may involve some automation of staff access to the VLE.

Please see our Support site for a full description of the Rollover process – http://www.esd.qmul.ac.uk/vle/staff/#rollover

What do you need to plan for?

The VLE as a live teaching environment – it reflects what is happening ‘right now’ at QMUL. Data that must be kept for a longer period of time than the academic year must be archived off the VLE. This means that exams, assignment submissions, etc. must be kept locally by departments under the same regulations that govern paper copies. We do this as we cannot guarantee a retrievable archive of this data over upgrades or migrations of VLE’s.

Please see the full text of the VLE Description of Service, to see how the VLE is run at QMUL, here: http://www.esddelu.org.uk/news-and-events/vle-description-of-service/

What do you need to do right now?

Nothing. This is simply a communication to alert you to an upcoming event. We will send out more detailed communications and requests for more information and will be hosting Q&A sessions about the process. If you are working on a course that you know typically falls outside of the Rollover process – we will contact you directly. If you are concerned that we may not be aware of your specific needs – please get in touch.

If you have any immediate concerns about this process, please email vle-support@qmul.ac.uk

Regards,

VLEAdmin

If you have any issues regarding the information in this service announcement, please contact the VLE Support team via the online query form on http://www.esd.qmul.ac.uk/vle/forms/ce6query/