[ed. Cydney Jones is a junior at UC Davis, and she was kind enough to share information and insights during my coverage of the UC Davis LMS outage (their Sakai-based LMS is branded as SmartSite and hosted by Scriba). I asked her if she could write a post giving a student’s inside view of the situation. You can follow Cydney on Twitter at @crabbyCyd.]
By: Cydney Jones
UC Davis’ SmartSite, the learning management system we love to hate, earned that hate when it went missing two weeks before the end of the Spring quarter. As used and abused by students and faculty, SmartSite is accessed constantly. Need to read new class materials, log into SmartSite. Want to learn about assignments and turn them in, access SmartSite. Curious about your grade, look it up on SmartSite. Accessible from anywhere, on campus or off, via smartphone or computer terminal, SmartSite was the glue that held most courses together.
It seemed odd that something so integral to every class and course would need to go down for maintenance in the middle of the term for more than two and a half days. But, the UCD IT department shared their communication from our LMS’s host, Scriba, saying that the system had suffered “failures in our primary data center.” It seemed odd that we were only give a day’s notice. We should have been more prepared, students, faculty, and administration alike. (more…)