e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: LMS

  • LMS Outage: Exclusive view of UC Davis contract with Scriba

    When I first heard about the recent LMS outage at UC Davis – which left the school with no LMS access for a full week and without a fully functional LMS through the remainder of the spring term – it was quite clear that this was an unusual situation. There have been plenty of other LMS outages, but with this one not only did UC Davis lose days of system access, during the outage they had no idea if and when the system would be restored. Any useful communication with the vendor ceased, and the school had to scramble and invent their own disaster recovery on the fly.

    What we didn’t know at the time was whether UC Davis staff had planned for such a contingency and had reasonable controls in place. Thanks to the media relations and IT teams at UC Davis, we at e-Literate now have the contract with Scriba to help answer these questions. I have also talked to Ian Dolphin, executive director at the Apereo Foundation that runs the Sakai project, and Michael Sanders, CEO of Scriba, to gather and verify the data in this post.

    In a nutshell, this was a screwup of colossal proportions by Scriba and Scriba alone. Furthermore, Scriba is no longer a Sakai Commercial Affiliate. (more…)

  • SmartSite Goes Dumb: A student’s view of the UC Davis LMS outage

    [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…)

  • Update on UC Davis LMS Fiasco: Finishing the term with two partial systems

    After the LMS outage that started May 20th – covered here, here, and here at e-Literate – UC Davis has finished its spring academic term as of June 9th using two partial systems, one for faculty and one for students and neither of which is fully functional. In other words, UC Davis never fully recovered its LMS (Sakai system branded as SmartSite) functionality from the outage. UC Davis staff have indicated they will provide more information to us by interviews and public records, but they have not said when they will be ready to talk. Scriba (the Sakai commercial affiliate and hosting provider that caused the outage) has not replied to requests for an interview or statement. When and if these occur, I’ll post updates.

    For a short timeline:

    • May 19th: Scriba notifies UC Davis of an emergency maintenance planned for May 20 – 23 as they changed data centers. Regarding the data center move, CEO Michael Sanders stated “The failures are as of a result of a third party and are outside of our control.” (irony alert inserted here)

      • (more…)

  • UC Davis, Sakai, and Open Source

    Phil has been a busy boy, putting out two pieces about some Blackboard research that had gotten some negative responses and two more on a horrifically bad LMS outage for UC Davis and other universities using support vendor Scriba.

    Our main schtick here at e-Literate is to get beyond the headlines. We try to explain what is actually happening and why it is important. Often, this involves puncturing hype like “robot tutors in the sky,” not by heaping them with scorn but by showing the gap between the hype and reality. But there are also times when we do the same for anti-hype. For example, there is a popular narrative that Blackboard is evil and bad and stupid, partly based on the massive brand damage the company did to itself a decade ago (and two CEOs ago). As a result, when they do…well…anything, it tends to be interpreted in the worst possible light. Personally, I’m glad that Blackboard is sharing the findings of their product research. I don’t know of many ed tech companies that are doing that. This is different than putting out a white paper about some study the company did showing how awesome their product is. Rather, it shows us how they are trying to understand their customers’ needs. Sharing that back with the world helps us, in turn, understand how Blackboard thinks. It is an important kind of transparency. As Phil’s second post on the topic highlights, we do have to understand that this kind of study is different than an academic study in order to draw the right conclusions from it. But that’s fine.

    Likewise, the Scriba outage story plays into a “Sakai is dying” narrative. As it happens, I was at conference for the foundation that hosts Sakai last week and got something of a rundown on what was going on, including a preview of the release scheduled to come out this summer. (Oddly, nobody mentioned the outage, which must have been in its early stages at that point.) The Sakai sustainability story is complicated enough to merit a separate post, which I will get to later this week. In the meantime, I’d like to put the Scriba outage in context of how open source works in general and how the Sakai ecosystem works in particular. Because it is very easy for this story to reinforce preconceptions rather than looking at it carefully on its own merits.

    Phil wrote,

    There is an interesting angle here in that Sakai is open source yet data is not easily recoverable.

    Right. Open source can help with problems like the Scriba outage. As far as I can tell, it did help UC Davis. But it’s not that simple. There is a lesson to be learned here for all LMS-using schools, but it’s not “open source doesn’t provide the flexibility that it is supposed to provide”; nor is it “Sakai is dying.”

    (more…)

  • UC Davis LMS Back Online: Update on what we know about Scriba Sakai outage

    I’ve been told by two sources that the UC Davis LMS outage I described in this post may be over, and the SmartSite LMS is back online (SmartSite is UC Davis’ implementation of Sakai, hosted by Scriba). I would like to update what we know about the overall situation while we wait for additional confirmation. The following is based on my conversations with a Scriba inside source who asked to remain anonymous, a student at UC Davis, the LISTedTECH team whose database powers our new LMS subscription service, some commenters from the blog post, and a more thorough review of the UC Davis IT status site. And I should point out that UC Davis team has done an excellent job in communications – timely messages with no defensiveness, and full transparency.

    The Outage

    On Thursday, May 19, Scriba notified UC Davis and several other schools that it would perform emergency maintenance starting Friday, May 20 at 9pm PDT and ending Monday, May 23 at 11am PDT. The outage was not caused by software applications but data center issues. I’ve asked what this means, and I’ve been told that Scriba will describe the outage in the next week. (more…)

  • Scriba Disaster: Sakai-based LMS for UC Davis is down with no plans for recovery

    In what might shape up as one of the worst LMS outages in recent history, UC Davis has been working without an LMS for the past week and does not expect their vendor to fix the problems before the end of the term. UC Davis uses a version of Sakai hosted by the LMS remnants of rSmart. In 2013 rSmart sold it’s Sakai-supporting LMS business to Asahi Net International, and in 2015 a private equity firm – Vert Capital – bought ANI and renamed it Scriba. Scriba hosts the Sakai LMS for UC Davis which has branded it as SmartSite.

    UC Davis is on the quarter system, with the last week of class next week (May 31) and finals the week of June 6. A few months ago UC Davis announced their intention to migrate to Canvas as their LMS. SmartSite subsequently went down on May 19th, and all signs are pointed to a complete and final outage. Scriba will not answer the phones (you get a message that the mailbox is full), and UC Davis staff are making a heroic attempt to in-house recreate LMS tools and even to recover grades that had been entered on SmartSite.

    UC Davis staff have replaced the smartsite.ucdavis.edu portal with a page telling faculty some methods to replace the LMS or go to Canvas early.

    UC_Davis_Smartsite

    There is no expectation for a repair by the vendor.

    On May 24th the UC Davis internal team sent this message to faculty and staff:

    We are working on extracting data from the SmartSite database. Our priority is to retrieve gradebook data for this quarter, and to make that information available to instructors as soon as possible. We are providing support for faculty to use alternatives to manage course materials for the rest of the quarter.

    This, folks, is a disaster. There is an interesting angle here in that Sakai is open source yet data is not easily recoverable. We will share more here at e-Literate as we find out new information.

    Update: Removed Buzzfeed post as unverified and not necessary for story.

    Update: Clarified that no expectation of repair by the vendor and that branding comes from UCD. Also adding the update from evening of May 26th.

    Progress continues on the Web interface to access grades. We expect that it will be available Friday (May 27).

    In addition, we have had a team working to build a local instance of SmartSite. This evening, the campus is completing internal testing on this limited version. A small group of selected faculty members will begin testing this version Friday morning. Depending on their results, we anticipate having this version available to spring 2016 instructors of record over the weekend. All of the content faculty have in SmartSite should be available to them.

    Please note that students will not have SmartSite access. While our goal remains to restore full access, this initial limited, local instance will only have capacity to support faculty access.

    Update: See this post for update on what happened and unconfirmed restoration of the system.

    I’ve been told by two sources that the UC Davis LMS outage I described in this post may be over, and the SmartSite LMS is back online (SmartSite is UC Davis’ implementation of Sakai, hosted by Scriba). I would like to update what we know about the overall situation while we wait for additional confirmation. The following is based on my conversations with a Scriba inside source who asked to remain anonymous, a student at UC Davis, the LISTedTECH team whose database powers our new LMS subscription service, some commenters from the blog post, and a more thorough review of the UC Davis IT status site. And I should point out that UC Davis team has done an excellent job in communications – timely messages with no defensiveness, and full transparency.

  • Previous LMS For Schools Moving to Canvas in US and Canada

    During the most recent quarterly earnings call for Instructure, an analyst asked an interesting question (despite starting off from the Chris Farley Show format).

    Corey Greendale (First Analysis Securities Corporation):  Awesome. A couple of other things on the, primarily on the Higher Ed space but I guess on education space, there’s a whole lot of couple questions about the competitive environment. When you’re and I don’t know if you will ever get into this level of granularity but when you got competitive wins against the Blackboard, are those predominantly from legacy ANGEL, are you getting those wins as much from Learn as well.

    Josh Coates (CEO of Instructure):  A lot of them are from Learn. Most, you know I don’t have the stats right off the top of my head. A lot of the ANGEL and WebCT stuff is been mopped up in the previous years and so, what’s left the majority of what’s left is Learn and our win rate against Blackboard it continues to be incredibly high, not just domestically but internationally as well.

    In fact, I think most of three out of the four international schools that we announced in this earnings where Blackboard Learn replacements, so yes Learn’s getting it.

    The question gets to the issue of whether Canvas is just picking up higher education clients coming off of discontinued LMSs (Angel, WebCT, etc) or if they are picking up clients from ongoing platforms such as Blackboard Learn. Beyond the obvious interest of investors and other ed tech vendors, this issue in general affects higher education institutions going through a vendor selection – for the system in consideration, are there many other schools considering the same migration path?

    Thanks to the work we’ve been doing with LISTedTECH and our new subscription service, we can answer this question in a little more detail. One of the charts we share shows higher education migrations over the past five years in the US and Canada. (more…)