Turnitin Downtime – Saturday, March 7
Turnitin has announced that their services are expected to be unavailable during a scheduled maintenance period on Saturday, March 7, 2015, from 10 AM to 2 PM.
Instructors are encouraged to modify assignment due dates to avoid the scheduled maintenance window.
Scheduled maintenance windows are the first and third Saturdays of each month, 7:00 AM to 11:00 AM Pacific Time, so just in case, you may want to avoid scheduling due dates around those times.
You can monitor Turnitin availability on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnitinStatus.
Removal of Old Moodle Courses
On February 19th, UMass IT Moodle Administrators removed access to Moodle courses taught through Spring 2013. Until Friday March 6th, by special arrangement, we can still recover course content or student grades and submissions. Please contact the Instructional Media Lab (413-545-2823 or instruct@oit.umass.edu) with inquiries.
After Friday March 6th, all content from courses taught through Spring 2013 will be permanently deleted.
Coming in July, 2015: Moodle 2.8
This spring your Moodle team will be busy preparing to upgrade from Moodle 2.5 (our current version) to the latest version, Moodle 2.8.
We are really excited about the many improvements and enhancements to the system, including:
- a new text editor that saves drafts
- more intuitive management and employment of Groups
- the ability to annotate PDFs submitted to Assignments
- many usability improvements such as progress bars for time consuming processes
- docking blocks, a feature in earlier versions of Moodle that was removed, will return.
February Moodle Updates
As we begin preparing for the upgrade to Moodle 2.8, the Moodle team has instituted a “code freeze” on moodle.umass.edu. This means that until the 2.8 upgrade, we will fix bugs and security issues, but will not be adding new features.
In February we made the following changes to Moodle:
- added a new one-click tool, Download all files, to help instructors export all files that were added to the course by an instructor, TA, or Course Designer. For details see: Download All Instructor Files from a Moodle Course.
- repaired a problem changing maximum grade values in manually created grade items.
- set the max upload limit (per upload) for all activities to be consistent (50 MB).
Fall & Summer Moodle Course Requests
Primary instructors can request courses in SPIRE for Fall and Summer 2015 classes beginning Monday, March 30th, 2015.
As always, don’t hestitate to contact the Instructional Media Lab with your questions about Moodle:
413-545-2823, or instruct@oit.umass.edu.
