May 26 update: Progress on restoring limited version of SmartSite

  • by Armando Arbizo

Here are today's updates on events and developments related to the continuing outage of SmartSite:

  • Campus technical staff continue to make progress on their efforts to provide limited SmartSite functionality to faculty. We will post more information in a later notice.
  • Work on recovering gradebook data is on track. Information and Educational Technology programmers have successfully queried and retrieved data from the SmartSite database, and are testing a web form which faculty could use to request data. Students' grades are safe. The campus expects final grades will be posted on schedule, and that students will be able to view them via my.ucdavis.edu.
  • Faculty received an email Wednesday evening with information about file-sharing groups and email class lists they can use with their students for their current courses and sections. Instructors who did not see the message can read a copy on the Authentic Message Registry.
  • IET is deploying technology and additional resources to the IT Express Service Desk, to supplement its capacity for providing support. The best way to contact IT Express is to call 530-754-HELP (4357) or, if you want to send an email and your question concerns the SmartSite outage, send it to smartsite-help@ucdavis.edu. If you need assistance on any subject, please check the IT Knowledge Base. It is available around the clock, and includes hundreds of articles about campus services.
  • IET's educational technology support group has scheduled drop-in hours in 50 Hutchison for faculty from 1 to 5 p.m. Monday-Friday for the rest of the quarter.
  • Today at 3 p.m., Andy Jones, associate director of Academic Technology Services for IET, will host a faculty forum with a discussion of some of the pedagogical uses of class mailing lists, Box.com, and other tools that have been suggested to faculty this week as alternatives to functions that had been performed by SmartSite. Jones and others also expect to be able to answer some questions about the IET goal of establishing a system to allow faculty to access and compute grades by the weekend. The forum will meet in Room 1310, The Grove (Surge III).

"By working to restore some of the SmartSite functionality to faculty, we also intend to support the needs of students," said David Levin, director of Academic Technology Services for IET. "Getting faculty access to grade data, assignments and other materials should benefit students as we continue to work on a larger recovery to this outage."

We will post another update to TechNews on Friday.

Information and Educational Technology thanks faculty, students and staff for their continuing patience, understanding, suggestions and cooperation as the campus works on recovering from the SmartSite outage. For previous daily updates on the outage, please see articles posted at TechNews.

 

For assistance, or if you have questions, please contact the IT Express Service Desk at 530-754-HELP (4357) or smartsite-help@ucdavis.edu (this email address should be used for SmartSite-related outages only).