Blog from December, 2016

You may experience problems navigating to, or logging in to, D2L and MU Video on Wednesday, January 4, and Thursday, January 5, 2017. If these interruptions do occur, they should be brief.

What May Be Interrupted

If brief outages occur, you may experience problems:

• loading the Millersville University homepage (www.millersville.edu)
• logging in to D2L using the "Login" button
• logging in to MU Video

What Will Not Be Interrupted

Even if on-campus outages occur:

• D2L will remain online. It runs in its own, off-campus data center.
• MU Video will remain online. It runs in its own, separate, off-campus data center.
• You will still be able to log in to D2L, just not by using the "Login" button.

Additionally:

• D2L logins by Kutztown students using the "InCommon Login" button will not be interrupted.
• D2L logins by Shippensburg students, by guests, and by others who normally use the "Guest Login" link will not be interrupted.
• If you are already logged in to D2L or MU Video before the start of a service interruption, the interruption will not affect you. You will be able to continue to work in the system.

How to Work Around Interruptions

If the Millersville University homepage becomes unreachable

Go directly to D2L: https://millersville.desire2learn.com/

If you experience problems logging in to D2L using the "Login" button

Follow the "Guest Login" link instead, and then use the same username and password you do with the "Login" button.

If you experience problems logging in to MU Video

Use "My Media" in D2L (found within the navbar's Content menu) to add or create new items in MU Video. Or wait for Millersville IT staff to restore MU Video logins.

Reason for Potential Interruptions

During first week of January 2017, Millersville Information Technology staff will move campus servers to a new data center within Boyer Hall. Millersville University outgrew its old data center, also in Boyer Hall, and now must migrate to its new, modern, better equipped facility.

IT staff have carefully planned this move to avoid interrupting access to the Millersville University homepage and to a key login server used by both D2L and MU Video. However, if problems arise during the move, the homepage, or the login server, could go offline.

As both the university homepage and login servers are clearly critical systems, if they do go offline, IT staff will restore them as quickly as possible. Therefore, any interruptions that do occur should be brief.

Questions?

Please contact the IT Help Desk.

Announcements

• Instructors may now create quicklinks to individual announcements using the Insert Quickink feature from the HTML Editor anywhere the editor can be accessed.

Assignments

• When creating or editing an assignment folder instructors can now fill in a "Notification Email" field. When filled in, an email will be sent to the indicated email address each time a new submission is uploaded to the folder.

Grades

• Instructors may now exempt a student from an assignment.
  
  • From Enter Grades page, use menu at the top of a grade column to open "Grade All" page for that item. Fill in checkbox for desired student(s) and click "Exempt" icon at top of list. Save.
• The Exempt designation will satisfy the release condition of  "No grade received" and allow the exempted student to see what the release condition is attached to.
• The Exempt designation will not satisfy the release condition of  "Grade Value on grade item". If set for an item, an exempted user will not have that item released to them.
• The Exempt designation will display to students at Grades and Class Progress.

Quizzes

• The interface for creating or editing true/false questions has been redesigned.

User Progress

• Information about which grades are being dropped from grade calculations is now clearly indicated to students under each category heading.
• Dropped items no longer appear to students on the Grades summary page of User Progress
• The weight of items as part of the final grade is now clearly communicated to students.

Resolved - 14 December 2016, 4:15 p.m. Eastern

D2L have corrected the problem and run the Banner-to-D2L update process. Requested courses that had been queued now exist in D2L.

Update - 14 December 2016, 4:00 p.m. Eastern

Technicians at D2L continue to work on this issue.

Initial Problem Report - 14 December 2016, 2:45 p.m. Eastern

We are currently experiencing a problem with D2L that is affecting course shell creation and enrollments. D2L is not processing the daily information updates sent to in by Banner, and as a result, D2L is neither creating new course shells nor processing adds and drops. D2L technicians are currently working to determine the cause of the problem. An update will be provided by 4 p.m. Eastern.