Professors and students may be behind due to two recent system failures with Blackboard and e-mail that occurred early last week on campus.
Associate Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, Carl Whitman, sent out a campus-wide e-mail last Monday on the issue.
In it, he informed faculty and students that the two unrelated issues “resulted in loss of access for an extended period of time to several critical applications, including Blackboard and e-mail.”
First, a failure in a critical hardware component caused a loss in Blackboard access as well as some access to campus e-mail. The issue was resolved that evening and Whitman reported that “no data was at risk and all e-mail was delivered.”
According to Stan Trevena, Director of Technology Services, the first half of Monday was spent waiting for a call back from the service provider; the second half waiting for a new part.
Although the server was repaired within 24 hours, several buildings on campus continued to experience problems accessing email the following day.
“In the end, one stick of memory was bad, and the motherboard was dead on that server,” Trevena said.
“We had the motherboard replaced and the services back up by 8 p.m. that night.”
Over that period of time some students grew frustrated over the inability to access Blackboard and e-mail.
“Homework-wise, my assignment for Visual Communications couldn’t be posted until after they fixed the issue,” Sean Gillespie (senior, History) said. “Every time they have an outage it seems catastrophic.”
Some professors that use Blackboard and e-mail to instruct their students said the outages certainly affected their classes.
“For one of my classes, I was unable to post the notes and unable to access and grade assignments that were submitted on Blackboard,” Psychology and Child Development Professor Dr. Victor X. Luevano said.
Professor Luevano said he had two other classes that were impacted by the outages.
Not only were his students unable to access important course material, they were denied timely feedback on their work.
According to Trevena, the Office of Technology Information is proactively working on reducing the possibility of future problems.
“We are looking into the possibility of acquiring equipment that would prevent a problem of this sort in the future.”