What is rollover?
This is the second in a series of communications to inform you of the process in place to ‘rollover’ the VLE from the current academic year to 2009/2010. This will describe in more detail what information you will need to provide.
It is extremely important that you read fully and understand these announcements. Not doing so may result in your losing data from your course.
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.
After Rollover you will no longer have access to your previous course areas.
Rollover consists of the following steps:
- We will request notice for courses that should run again next year
- We will backup all course areas in late August at the end of the resit period
- We will only make 09/10 versions for course areas for which we have received notice
- We will then take all 08/09 course areas off the system
This process will take place at the end of summer after the resit period. This year (2009) this process will take place the week beginning 24th August. We will ‘go dark’, meaning we will remove all access to the system, for that week.
Why do we have Rollover?
1) We run the VLE as a live teaching environment; 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.
2) As the system grows larger in use and size we design formal processes with direct lines of ownership and responsibility for course areas to help manage it. We will refresh this information each year to insure that the contact we have for a course area is correct.
3) The system grows in size each year and, where possible, we need to remove unused content.
What do you need to do right now?
Nothing. This is simply a communication to alert you to an upcoming event. An email will go out to any member of staff with Designer or Instructor (click here to read about what a Designer or Instructor is) access to any course area in mid-April. You will need to reply to that email with the information requested about your course area. This email will include the username of the Owner of the course for the next year and the title of your course as it appears in CE6.
If you have any immediate concerns about this process, please email vle-support@qmul.ac.uk
Regards,
CE6 Admin
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/