Dev Diaries #2: Upgrade Roadmap

>>> Looking for the Migration Impact Form?

With the announced migration of My Dundee to a brand new home in the cloud, CTIL and UoD IT have begun rehearsing and testing the process ready for the actual move at the end of the year. We’ve also started to work through the migration impact forms we’d previously announced and are busy planning what interim provision will be available during the migration week.

Impact Forms

It is very important that anyone with active learning and teaching activities requiring access to My Dundee between the 15th and 21st of December, reports this to us via our Migration Impact Form. We’re setting a deadline of the 24th of October for submitting this form. Once we have collected responses, we will finalise and release details of the interim provision shortly after.

The key areas we’ve identified so far are as follows:

• Read access to content in modules for students with ongoing work e.g. assignments due early January.
• Access to submission of Turnitin assignments for a limited number of modules.
• Access to marking in Turnitin for staff.
• Access to grade centre for downloading and returning grades to SITS
• Access to Blackboard Collaborate for a small number of distance learning courses.
• We have also identified a small number of distance learning courses that will continue to run past the end of semester.

We still need to hear from anybody requiring support, even if you think your needs have been covered in the above list.

Once we have processed responses and determined the interim provision, we will make an announcement through the staff/student newsletters as well as contact those who submitted a for directly.

We understand that there is no good time to interrupt access to My Dundee and we will be making every effort to minimise impact for staff and students. Saying that, there will be disruption during the migration, so our default advice is to avoid any learning and teaching activities during that week if possible.

Roadmap

As this post is being published, we are getting access to the first rehearsal migration of My Dundee. Between now and December, UoD IT will be working with Blackboard to rehearse the process of migrating our data to it’s new home. These rehearsals mimic what will need happen during the live migration so that any issues can be ironed out and the process itself can be made as efficient and robust as possible. Blackboard have completed more than 400 migrations with institutions around the world so we feel assured that we are in good hands.

A big part of this rehearsal process will be testing. CTIL’s role is making sure that all modules, tools, organisations, assessments etc. work exactly as expected after the migration. Any issues that come up (there will always be some) will get reported to IT who will work with Blackboard to resolve them ready for December. Additionally, we will be reaching out to specific contacts in schools in the coming weeks the schools to give them the opportunity to confirm that all seems well with their own content.

A final key aim of these rehearsals is to allow Blackboard and our colleagues in Park Place to accurately measure each step of the process. This is vital for planning an efficient, robust migration and will allow us to publish a detailed schedule to our users.

Next Post

We will post again in a fortnight via the staff newsletter on the 24th of October.