Course Size Strategy
Oct. 28, 2014—Earlier this year, the OAK Steering Committee approved a decision to transition OAK to what’s called “managed hosting.” OAK is powered by the course management system Blackboard. We have run Blackboard on Vanderbilt web servers since the system was adopted about a decade ago. This winter, OAK will be moving to Blackboard servers, a move...
Course Reactivation Requests
Oct. 17, 2014—Earlier this month, most courses prior to Fall 2013 (over 40,000 courses in all), were made inactive as part of an effort to improve OAK’s performance. Faculty who need access to an old course can email oak@vanderbilt.edu and provide the following details: subject area and course number, semester, and instructor name. You can consolidate requests...
New Guide to Course Management Tools
Sep. 29, 2014—by Derek Bruff, Director, Center for Teaching, cross-posted from the CFT blog As Vanderbilt faculty, staff, and students have learned this fall, Vanderbilt’s course management system, OAK (powered by Blackboard), is currently experiencing significant delays. While the OAK team at VUIT continues working to fix these problems, instructors who find OAK’s slow performance to be...
Regularly Scheduled Down Time: Sunday, Nov 17 6AM-10AM
Oct. 24, 2013—OAK will be down Sunday, November 17 from 6AM to 10AM for maintenance. We do not expect the outage to last the entire four hours. Please visit the main OAK website for maintenance updates, OAK availability, and regularly scheduled maintenance dates. Note about Regularly Scheduled Maintenance: Though we like to have our servers up 24/7,...
October Maintenance Date Moved Forward to Sunday, Oct 13 6AM – 10AM
Oct. 11, 2013—OAK will be down Sunday, October 13 between the hours 6AM and 10AM for routine maintenance. We do not expect the outage to last the entire four hours. Please visit the main OAK website for maintenance updates, OAK availability, and regularly scheduled maintenance dates. Students will notice that all their courses (both available and unavailable)...
Course Instructors: Have you tried the new Inline Assignment Grading feature?
Jun. 14, 2013—With the recent OAK upgrade, course instructors can now grade student assignments “inline.” What does that mean? Instead of downloading files, editing them in MS Word and uploading them back in OAK, or printing them out and grading them manually, you can now view and grade the assignments instead your browser. The available tools are...
OAK Element: TurningPoint Upgrade to TurningPoint 5
May. 16, 2013—TurningPoint, the student response system (clickers) used at Vanderbilt, will be upgraded Thursday, May 16 at 6:00 AM. NO OUTAGE IS REQUIRED. However, instructors will need to download the new TurningPoint client (instructions below). The new version, TurningPoint 5.2.0, is compatible with Office 2013. Students may need to verify that their devices are registered in...
May Outage Scheduled to include Maintenance and Upgrade
May. 6, 2013— OAK will be down Sunday and Monday, May 12-13 (available again by 8AM Tuesday, May 14) for routine maintenance and a software upgrade. The upgrade from Blackboard 9.1 Service Pack 8 to Blackboard 9.1 Service Pack 11 will consist of several new features and bug fixes, including copy/paste from Word, a new interactive Calendar tool, and...
CANCELLED: Regularly Scheduled Down Time Sunday, April 21
Apr. 1, 2013—04.01.13 OAK will NOT be down Sunday, April 21 for maintenance. Please visit the main OAK website for maintenance updates, OAK availability, and regularly scheduled maintenance dates. Note about Regularly Scheduled Maintenance: Though we like to have our servers up 24/7, there are times when we need to take them down to perform regular maintenance....
Regularly Scheduled Down Time: Sunday, January 20, 6AM-10AM
Jan. 15, 2013—OAK will be down Sunday, January 20 from 6AM to 10AM for maintenance. We do not expect the outage to last the entire four hours. Please visit the main OAK website for maintenance updates, OAK availability, and regularly scheduled maintenance dates. Note about Regularly Scheduled Maintenance: Though we like to have our servers up 24/7,...