Moodle @ University of Bath

BUCS will be performing a major update of the Panopto lecture capture platform on Monday 30th January 2012 from 9.00am onwards.

This is in order to provide primarily critical stability and resilience fixes, but also to enable some new features. Due to the complexity of the update a full service may not be resumed until the end of the week, Friday 3rd February 2012.

During this time the service will be at risk and we do not recommend that any recordings are conducted until a formal announcement that the update has completed.

Users who have installed the desktop Panopto Recorder application on their own PC or Mac will need to update their client application following the upgrade. You will be taken to a link to download an update the next time the application is run. If the recorder application was installed by your IT supporter, please contact them so that your PC can be prepared for the update.

Any questions regarding this update, please contact lecture-capture@bath.ac.uk.

The Moodle-SAMIS Integration has now been re-enabled following the successful completion of the SAMIS upgrade.

Should you have any questions about the integration, please direct them to the e-learning Team who will be happy to assist.

BUCS have notified us that they are intending to make some changes to SAMIS this week and as a result, SAMIS is expected to be unavailable until 6th January.

In order to protect Moodle enrolments during this time, we have turned off all integration with SAMIS (including both automatic and manually invoked methods).  As soon as we receive notification that the process has been completed satisfactorily, we will re-enable the Moodle/SAMIS synchronisation and will update users via this blog.

As many of you will be aware, there were some unexpected issues with Moodle enrolments last weekend.

We are still looking into the exact cause of this problem, however the team have made the decision to turn off the nightly synchronisation with Moodle over the Christmas period (24th December – 2nd January), in order to ensure that the enrolment status of users within Moodle will be maintained over the Christmas period.

Whilst automated enrolments will be turned off during this time, it will still be possible to manually synchronise individual courses with Moodle (via the SAMIS Integration block) should you need to do so.

Should you have any questions about this or any other aspect of Moodle, the team will be available (via e-learning@bath.ac.uk) until the closure of the University on 23rd December, returning on 3rd January.

In the meantime, we would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The e-Learning Team can confirm that (following a full synchronisation with SAMIS), all Moodle enrolments have been restored.  If there are any further concerns regarding enrolments, please contact the team (e-learning@bath.ac.uk) and we will do what we can to assist.

The team are still looking into the exact cause of the problem, however initial investigations suggest that the Moodle synchronisation on Friday night may have been adversely affected by other processes happening in SAMIS at the same time.

We would like to apologise for the disruption that this has caused, and will be working with colleagues in other teams in order to minimise the likelihood of this happening again in the future.

The e-Learning team, along with colleagues in BUCS, are continuing to work together to find a resolution to the current issues affecting Moodle.

We will update this blog later on today with current progress.

If you would like to be notified when service is fully restored, please contact the e-Learning team at: e-learning@bath.ac.uk.

The e-Learning team, having been contacted by the BUCS Out of Hours service, are aware that some students and staff are experiencing problems in trying to access Moodle courses related to taught units and programmes. We are currently investigating the issue and will update this blog as and when we have an update.

If you would like to be notified when service is fully restored, please contact the e-Learning team at: e-learning@bath.ac.uk.

Staff/Teachers

Student cohorts can be manually re-synchronised with your Moodle course. There is a screencast (with accompanying audio) showing you how to do this at http://go.bath.ac.uk/nqop – click on the Play button to watch the video.

Please note that you will need to do this for each cohort that is currently “missing”.