On Monday morning of last week, the Michigan State University community (faculty, staff, and students) was greeted with the unfortunate news that ANGEL (our campus wide course management system) was down. The day dragged on with no fix. Many on campus (both student and faculty alike) reacted more like it was the zombie apocalypse than a problem with the server that would (eventually) get dealt with. Emails flew hither and yon about what we (the faculty were supposed to do), students dialed up their “oh my god, what am I supposed to do, I can’t get to my course” freak-out factor to DEFCON 1, and there was general mayhem on campus. In the immortal words of Dr. Venkman, “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!” (well, not literally, but that was definitely the vibe on campus for awhile). When all was said and done, ANGEL was down (or up, but completely useless because of constant errors) for 3 days (give or take a few hours).
Even though I wasn’t overly impacted by the outage (I avoid ANGEL like the plague – except for keeping my grade book – I’ve got a hard time making 2 + 2 add up to 4), I have the utmost sympathies for my colleagues and students. Honestly, who can blame ‘em. As faculty, we are strongly encouraged to mount both online and offline courses on ANGEL – and most faculty do. For all of its problems (and I, personally, think its got a lot of problems), ANGEL definitely has its benefits. The kicker is that many faculty and students come to over rely upon it, firmly believing that nothing will ever go wrong. At MSU (and at many other universities that rely heavily on a centralized course management system) there is no real sense that a healthy technological ecosystem, just like a natural ecosystem, requires diversity. So, when the system goes down, it isn’t a great surprise that everything goes to “H-E-double hockey sticks” very quickly.
So, in the spirit of the Great MSU ANGEL Outage of 09, here are some constructive thoughts on what you can do to either prepare for or mitigate the damage caused by a protracted outage of your course management system:
- If your course management system is the primary method by which you mass email your students, take some time at the beginning of the semester to compile all of your student’s emails. That way, you can manually send out a mass email assuring them that it isn’t the end of the world when the system goes down. It is probably wise to get a secondary emails – just in case your email system has gone down as well (seriously, it happens). This way, you can bypass the entire university technology infrastructure and communicate with your students.
- If you’ve got the option of mounting course material elsewhere (if you’ve got your own website, or have some server space provided by the university), do it. You don’t have to make everything available, maybe just the syllabus (course schedule, assignments, etc.). This way, if students normally access course material online (as opposed to in a physical, printed format) they will be able to get vital info about upcoming assignments, due dates, etc. even when the course management system is down.
- At the beginning of the semester, strongly encourage your students to save course material locally (or go old school and print out hard copies). So, if the system goes down, they’ve got vital course info, reading, etc at their fingertips.
- Don’t send email after email to your IT/tech support department. Trust me, they know that the system is down already, and you are only taking time away from their efforts to get things fixed (believe me, they want to get the problem dealt with as badly as you do)
- In the wake of the course management system apocalypse, be as flexible as possible with how you pick up the pieces. Don’t shortchange your students on due dates in an effort to get your schedule completely back on track with your schedule. Remember, it isn’t their fault that the system went down. Also, remember that if your class went down, so did all of the rest of your student’s classes. That means your students have 3 or 4 other professors who are madly trying to get their classes back on track – all of which can result in more panic for your students.
- In the immortal words of the good book, Don’t Panic! At the end of the day, there isn’t a whole heck of a lot you can do about the outage. Freaking out will only stress you out more…and stress is bad. It’ll get fixed, I promise.
What are your tips for surviving a course management system outage?
(The photo for this entry is from Flickr user Gerald Simmons and is licensed through Creative Commons.)
Comments
1. Courtney - September 15, 2009 at 11:33 am
LOL! Venkman quote... that makes my day!
2. leigh - September 15, 2009 at 12:11 pm
I teach a fully online course (topic Teaching K12 Students Online, go figure.) During the "great outage" I replicated my course content into another CMS (hosted on my own domain) -- ANGEL is still the "main" course site, but my Moodle site has the lab/lecture/assignments that they need so if and when things blow up again, they're not totally down for the count. All of my images/video/audio files are hosted elsewhere & embedded so it's a simple copy/paste of the html code for the pages to replicate. Yes, one extra step, but well worth it. Luckily when ANGEL was "on" briefly during the outage, I could grab the code, since the pages were not rendering :)
I used the Registrar's Office list to email students of the back-up site, but keeping an offline list is a great idea.
Hopefully I was a good role model for my students -- I didn't panic (not worth it) -- our next unit is on course management systems, so this makes a great case study. Talk about turning lemons into lemonade!
3. Lisa - September 15, 2009 at 12:22 pm
This is very timely--I couldn't take attendance through Blackboard just this morning, because it was down AGAIN (I do it there in order to avoid transmitting attendance records by hand into my Bb Gradebook later). I was saved by good old paper. This might have been a real problem, though, had a I planned a PowerPoint presentation; I have a bad habit of posting them there so that students can reference them later. Next time, I'll also be gmailing it to myself...
BTW, can someone recommend free, preferably cloud-based, gradebook software? Bb's is horribly clunky, slow, and redundant, but it does work (more or less) AND I especially like the transparency it provides to students. What I'd REALLY love, though, is an "attendance app" for my iPhone. :)
4. Ashley - September 15, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Lisa, I do not know of an I-Phone app, but I do know of a nifty/simple web based attendance tracker. Check out http://www.myattendancetracker.com/.
5. Boone Gorges - September 15, 2009 at 01:52 pm
IANAL but I would be wary of putting grades in the cloud. The threat of FERPA is often raised when people talk about holding courses in open/cloud/unencrypted/not-on-campus-owned-servers spaces. The threat is often based on an erroneously broad interpretation of FERPA, in my understanding. But in the case of grades of record I do think that FERPA applies. So for me, the way to protect myself from death of the CMS is to move everything off the CMS: content creation into distributed services, and grades into a worksheet stored only on my own hard disks (or on paper).
On a related note, Prof. Hacker team, it would be great to see a post on using spreadsheet functions to build your own gradebook. Let me know if you'd like someone to write it :-D
6. Lisa - September 15, 2009 at 02:16 pm
Boone, after further reflection, I think you're right. I do use other Web 2.0 apps (eg Google Docs) for student work, but I think my university admin (and possibly students) would feel uneasy with grades "up/out there," and that's understandable. So I may be stuck with Blackboard. I have used spreadsheets for years and years, but again, the ability of a student to access his/her ongoing average, in real time, is an important component of my teaching philosophy.
7. Derek - September 15, 2009 at 02:54 pm
I second Boone's suggestion about a post on using Excel as a gradebook. I've learned a lot about Excel over the years, mostly from other faculty, and I know that my grade calculations would be a lot more work if I didn't know a few Excel tricks. I'm sure there are readers of ProfHacker who are where I was with Excel a few years ago. I'm glad to share some of my techniques.
8. Ethan Watrall - September 15, 2009 at 03:04 pm
yeah - as tempting as it is - a cloud based approach is a baaad idea. Mainly because the FERPA police will come and break your kneecaps.
9. Amy Cavender - September 15, 2009 at 07:58 pm
I hadn't thought of the FERPA issue. I keep my gradebook only for myself rather than making it available to students (I give numbers as grades, so if students are keeping track of their total they know where they stand), but I may have to rethink how and where I keep it.
10. Dr. GC Fiedler - September 15, 2009 at 10:04 pm
I would REJOICE.
Relying totally on content delivery systems is stupid. I keep my students submissions on local machines that are backed up. I keep my own content on a server independent of our DE system, and can easily get my site online again after a failure.
11. JoannaOC - September 15, 2009 at 11:03 pm
I create a group email address for each of my classes at the beginning of the term because I don't like using the CMS email feature. If we were down for a few days, I'd break out the chalk and punt. It would only really be an issue if an assignment were due to be submitted online,but then I'd ask them to either email it or hand it in the old fashioned way.
12. john - September 16, 2009 at 04:31 pm
It always amazes me how reliant we've become on technology, cell phones, email... I wonder how things worked before course management systems?
13. George H. Williams - September 16, 2009 at 05:07 pm
1995: Man, you should have been there when the photocopier broke down. Talk about pandemonium!
1985: What?! The mimeograph's not working again!
1975: Who took all the chalk without replacing it!
1965: Now that the power's out, I guess we should cancel classes. Can't teach in the dark!
...
1725: What do you mean there aren't any knives to cut quills?!
1666: The fire in the library destroyed everything! Now what do we do?
=)
It's always a good idea to have a backup plan and remember that the old ways still work.
14. GC Fiedler - September 16, 2009 at 07:21 pm
I think the problem with most university content systems is that they actually make things unnecessarily complicated and aren't saving students or faculty any time.
15. Lisa - September 16, 2009 at 11:52 pm
George, I still hear (and sometimes say) 1995 and 1975 on a regular basis! Guess some of those "old" technologies never really die. And of course, the greatest library fire of all time turned out to be probably apocryphal.
That said, I think there are important philosophical/pedagogical reasons for seeking alternatives to CMSs. I wrote a little about it to explain to my students at at my course blog: http://hotbookwsu.wordpress.com/about-the-blog/ It might be summed up as teaching in public.
16. Cardinal - September 17, 2009 at 09:50 am
We're on to day 6 of our CMS (some accursed "upgrade" to Blackboard) being completely inaccessible. I have been putting all the important links and documents on a hand-coded webpage hosted on a departmental server, but the tricky part has been getting the word out the students, since the only access to one's class roster is via, you guessed it, the CMS. It adds to my workload considerably to have to gather hundreds of students' e-mail addresses on paper and type them into my mail program, not to mention the potential for transcription errors.
17. Nels P. Highberg - September 18, 2009 at 09:40 pm
Cardinal, you might consider writing your email address on the board and telling students to email you for the link. Then you can just hit reply, paste the URL in the email, and they've got it. Sounds like you'll get hundreds of emails, but it also sounds like hitting reply and pasting in a link will take less time than typing in each address specifically.
18. GC Fiedler - September 18, 2009 at 09:49 pm
Ha-ha! I've tried that and find that I spend more time reminding students to email me than doing cryptology to figure out what a written email address is.
The other thing is that students often sign up to our university's system with an email other than the account they actually use on a regular basis. So, even if I can get their emails at the beginning of the term, they won't get messages.
For Cardinal, she/he could just write up a single link on the white/chalkboard or PP slide during lecture. Then she tells students they need to use that link to get their content and it's their responsibility to do so. If they don't attend lecture that day, so be it.
19. Nels P. Highberg - September 19, 2009 at 01:47 pm
Yes, it's true that many don't write, at least when I've done this. Frankly, I just don't care at that point. I know I've done my best, and the rest is up to them. I had open-note quizzes last week, and there were those who were completely lost because they never contacted me to get the material. They have been on the ball since, though!
20. Gordon Marie - October 17, 2009 at 05:59 pm
I was looking for a good attendance system. Thanks for the recomendation.
21. Bill Gibson, II - December 15, 2009 at 03:56 pm
Since you are already familiar with Wordpress, you already have a pretty powerful tool for taking up the slack in the event of an institutional CMS Crash.
You could create a "category" for each course ("PHIL101.02") you teach during a semester and require your students to subscribe to the RSS feed. You assign one or more course categories to a posting and it gets pushed out appropriately. In the event that email goes down you can still carry on a generic dialogue with the class, which could get you through a 3 day system burp.
You can password protect documents as necessary, or if necessary, and possible, lock down a WP course site, just as you do in Angel/Blackboard/Moodle. Depending on who's hosting your instance of WP(MU), you may have plugins that provide most the functionality that you normally have in Angel. Embedding YouTube video, audio, PowerPoint, Excel, PDFs, etc.
If the campus network goes nuts, and you have one or more sites (3 GB free account) on Wordpress.com, you could still work from there. Yes, each student would at least have to have an account there (if you're going to create a private course site), but they wouldn't need to create their own site if they didn't wish to.
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