2019 Faculty Technology Showcase: Call for Nominations

The 2019 Faculty Technology Showcase will be held on Friday, February 22nd in room A232 Gordon Palmer Hall. The call for nominations is now open!

The goal of the Faculty Technology Showcase is to provide an opportunity for our community to share with one another how technology is being used across campus. Please nominate your colleagues who incorporate technology in both innovative and practical ways that enhance teaching and learning, assist with research, and/or increase professional productivity. You are welcome to nominate yourself as well.

Presentations will be in the form of electronic poster sessions that will last approximately 50 minutes each.

There are two ways to submit the names and email addresses for those you would like to nominate.  You can complete this brief Qualtrics survey. Please submit nominations by Wednesday, November 28, 2018.

Tegrity Maintenance – Nov. 11th

Maintenance is scheduled to take place on Sunday, November 11, 2018, between midnight-2am CST. Access to Tegrity services will not be available during this time

Tegrity Service Disruption – Nov. 5

There was a disruption to the Tegrity service between the hours of 8:45 and 10:45 PM CST. During this time, users were unable to access their Tegrity instance and would receive an error when uploading recordings.

Service was restored around 10:45 PM CST.

Temporary Halt to New Blackboard Integrations

The UA Blackboard Learn team has made the decision to halt all pending integrations until an audit of our existing integrations and the potential issues they may cause is complete.

Early in the Fall 2018 semester, UA’s Blackboard Learn system went completely down twice in one week. The downtimes were minimized to about 30 minutes each due to the quick action of our Bb and UA support teams. An incident analysis revealed that the outage was caused by a malfunctioning grade synch process used by a textbook publisher integration. Although this integration is only used by about 10 of the 7000 UA fall classes in Blackboard Learn, many thousands of users were affected by the outage.

In the interest of preventing future performance issues, UA’s Blackboard team has decided to audit and reevaluate the 130+ integrations currently in place. We also plan to strengthen our guidelines for vetting and testing integrations. Once those tasks are done, we will be able to consider new integration requests again. No existing integrations will be removed or altered without communicating with users.

Turnitin Issue Resolved

Turnitin experienced service issues between 4:32pm – 5:09pm on September 27th.  Those issues have been resolved and the system is currently functioning as expected.

Turnitin Outage – Sept. 27, 2018

Turnitin is currently experiencing a service disruption that is affecting all of their customers. Their engineering team is currently working to resolve the issue.