Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Learning Management Sys

  • Snow Storm Effect On Traffic

    Tuesday afternoon a bit of snow hit Georgia. We get them occasionally even down here in the southern United States. Usually they hit the mountains. Everywhere else, we just shut down for a few days. Unfortunately, we do not have all of our Atlanta schools on one system or all of our south Georgia schools…

  • 10.2 Upgrade

    Later this week both of our production systems will get upgraded from Desire2Learn 9.4.1 to 10.2. This will be an epic effort. Over several days a few dozen people will work on various aspect of the databases, application servers, and testing. Good ‘ole clean IT fun just in time for Christmas. Finding the magical gap…

  • Each D2L Site Broke 25 Million Hits

    Night School is the last time I posted stats here. So this is probably due. This Yaketystats graph records the daily hits for each site in green and pink. The gray is a total of the two. I had it go back to April first to show our spring load compared to how we are…

  • Host Hopping Cookies

    It started with a tweet on Saturday morning. @MsIngalls: When I go to the Checklist in @Desire2Learn -when I am logged in – I get an error message that says my log in has expired – ideas? #d2l This sounded like an issue we had in WebCT Vista product I called Failed Sessions. FSes occur when…

  • LMS Brackets

    I don’t really follow basketball. So, it is odd that I even registered this tweet from Dennis Kavelman, @dkavelman:   Team D2L has 4 schools in sweet sixteen! Go #marquette, #arizona, #msu, #osu! @desire2learn He is excited because four universities who are clients of his company are in the major NCAA basketball championship contest. If only four are…

  • Bulk User Management

    The Desire2Learn conversion process strips our Blackboard Vista sections of students and instructors. Our clients naturally want instructors and designers enrolled in the migrated courses (BbVista sections are D2L courses). So obviously we had to enroll them. The options were the XML (Holding Tank) format or the CSV (Bulk User Management) format. I helped a…

  • Automated Testing

    On a call today, our new vendor asked that we verify every web site works before having them apply service packs. Our analyst said, “We can do that.” I pointed out the problem causing the present concern happened one in ten times on one site on one server of the instance. Therefore to catch it,…

  • The Long Problem

    We encountered a vexing issue where sections did not appear for the class list for students. We confirmed the students were properly enrolled. We confirmed the current date was between the dates for learning contexts and terms. We confirmed the access was granted to the students. Still, the sections were not showing, but the usual…

  • Content Migration Progress Tracking

    When moving hundreds of thousands of courses between WebCT Vista and Desire2Learn, keeping track of what made it through which stage seems like an obvious hindsight thing to do. I added that last bit because we started to notice where things fell between the cracks starting to pile up. The basic process… Through Oracle SQL…