First the bad news....

First day back at work today, and a mixed day - good news and bad news! Lets get the bad news over first. eMail's been down all day.  I know there's about 550 unread emails in my inbox, and I can't get at them. Some might say that was a good thing, but not for the guys trying to fix it. A hardware failure last night - a disc array broke - and the whole file database needs rebuilding. 7 hours or so into the rebuild (at half five tonight), it failed. Lots of hard work from the unix and filestore team, including starting  to mount the most recent backups in case the worst happens and we can't get the database rebuilt. Expecting an update in the early hours of the morning, and an early meeting tomorrow to decide on actions.  Great team working on it though - thanks guys.

And now for the good news - over the past year we reviewed our VLE and agreed to implement Blackboard - Learn 9.1 as a major upgrade to MOLE (My online learning environment). Today we reached a major milestone of implementation project, with the go-live of MOLE2 to the first pilot department - the School of Dentistry.

Over the next few weeks, students and staff in the School will start using the new system, and over the next few months, the VLE Project team will be in touch with all Faculties and Departments  to discuss the best time to move to the upgraded service, and it’s hoped that around half the courses will move to the new service in September 2011, with the remainder moving in September 2012. All courses built within the current MOLE environment will be transferred to the new service as and when required, so no investment of time and energy in building courses now will be wasted.

It's been a team effort, as most successful projects are,  so thanks to the whole team - colleagues from LeTS, CiCS, Dentistry & the Library.