eCampus, the eCampus Request System and all integrated third-party tools will be offline from 12:01 a.m. Thursday, July 23 until 11:59 p.m. Monday, July 27 for complex work that will ensure WVU can quickly scale up to a fully online learning environment if needed. The system will be moved from physical, on-campus servers to a more agile, cloud-based environment managed by Blackboard in time for the start of the fall semester.
Though there is never a good time for a mission-critical system to be down, these dates were approved as being disruptive to the smallest possible number of faculty and students. Instructors teaching during the second summer term should prepare for this outage, as this is the selected time frame available to both WVU and Blackboard before fall classes begin.
ITS will need to begin to prepare for the migration to the cloud beginning on Monday, July 20. As a result, beginning Monday July 20, instructors will need to pause work in eCampus related to active development for course content. eCampus will be unavailable for instructional use beginning Thursday, July 23 until 11:59 p.m. Monday, July 27. Content development and all other activity may resume when the migration is complete on July 28.
The necessary shift to remote teaching during the spring semester stressed eCampus and related technology resources in unprecedented ways, requiring workarounds such as the recurring lockdown of the system during final exams. Those experiences helped ITS determine how to expand capacity and prevent future lockdowns.
This project has many other advantages, including faster access to new features and bug fixes. There will no longer be a need for the usual extended outages in May and January to deploy system upgrades.
This move also allows for constant system monitoring by Blackboard staff, who will ensure problems are either prevented or corrected quickly. While ITS eCampus administrators will still handle day-to-day issues and support, system maintenance will be scheduled by the vendor when needed, with minimal, if any, impact.
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