Wednesday, May 9, 2012

IT Update

To update everyone on what has been going on for the IMU IT Services.

The IT Department has upgraded the server and so far it seems to have resolved the long downtime on Sundays even though maintenance and backup is still carried out on Sunday. Maintenance and backup will be changed to Saturday early morning to further minimize disruption to E-Learning access. However there are some occasional reports of database errors popping up, the ELearning staff are still trying to diagnose the error. Please do let me know details of errors (date, time, which part of the portal and error message shown if possible) so that I can feedback to the E-Learning Department. They are currently very shorthanded with only 2 staff and 1 department head handling the E-Learning material for the entire university.

Stronger wifi access ports have been installed in the deeper PBL rooms as part of trial of the new equipment. It seems that wifi access in PBL rooms is indeed more stable and faster. Please do also do feedback about this as well the IT Department also needs to know whether the equipment is performing as well as the manufacturer claims it to be.

Prof Peter Pook, the Executive Dean has told us that work is currently in progress to reshoot the CSU videos with proper legal documentation so that the videos can be posted up on to Youtube or other public domains. This is to make it easier for students to view the videos and also to reduce the burden on IMU's servers. The issue with the current CSU videos is that the doctors and actors did not consent for video to be published on public domain. Please bear in mind this is a long term project but rest assured that work is in progress.

During the previous Academic Meeting, Prof Peter Pook also gave the green light for lecturers' emails to be made available in students' IMU email address books. However this is not possible because of a technical problem. To work around this, I will propose to Prof Peter to email the list of lecturers' emails to every student in their IMU email. In addition to this, mentor mentee lists are being made available in the 'Timetable and Notices' section of ELearning for every batch and course. The lecturers' emails and contact details can be found inside there. So far it is available for BM, CH, CM, ND and PS. The rest of the courses are on the way.

As for the SRC blog, we are currently working on a new SRC website with more features and better content to serve all of you better. I daresay that it is better than the Monash Students' Association. ;)

IT Rep SRC 12/13

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