Managed Hosting Transition Schedule
Over the next two months, Vanderbilt’s OAK course management system, powered by Blackboard, will move from Vanderbilt servers to Blackboard servers. This transition to what’s called “managed hosting” will improve performance and reliability and make available new tools for instructors. These tools include Kaltura, a tool for sharing and managing multimedia files, and a content management tool that will make it simpler to reuse materials across multiple courses. See the November 3rd MyVU article on managed hosting for more context.
As part of the move to managed hosting, courses now available on OAK (those from Fall 2013 to present) will be copied by the transition team and loaded onto the new Blackboard environment. Courses will be migrated in batches, first the Fall 2013 courses, then the Spring 2014 courses, and so on. See the schedule below.
For each batch, courses will be inactivated (and thus not accessible by faculty and students) for a period of time (1-2 weeks) while the courses are copied. After the copying phase, courses will remain inactive until the managed hosting environment is switched on in late December. During this time period (after copying and before managed hosting), faculty may request that a course be reactivated by emailing oak@vanderbilt.edu. However, any changes made to the reactivated course will not be reflected in the version of the course on managed hosting going forward.
Consider the Fall 2013 batch as an example:
- November 10th – Fall 2013 courses on OAK will be inactivated. The course copying process will begin. Courses will be entirely inaccessible by faculty and students during this process.
- November 24th– Course copying should be complete by this date, perhaps sooner. At this point, Fall 2013 courses will remain inactive, although faculty can request individual courses be reactivated by emailing oak@vanderbilt.edu.
- Late December / Early January – Fall 2013 courses, as they were on November 10th, will be accessible to faculty and students in the new Blackboard managed hosting environment.
What does this mean for faculty and students? If you need access to materials from your Fall 2013 OAK courses (perhaps for use in your current course or in a Spring 2015 course), you should download those materials to a personal drive before November 10th. If you realize later that you need materials from Fall 2013 courses, after November 24th, you’ll be able to request access to those courses.
There are similar implications for more recent courses, per the following migration schedule:
- November 10th – Fall 2013 courses inactivated and copied.
- November 17th – Spring 2014 courses inactivated and copied.
- December 1st – Summer 2014 courses inactivated and copied.
- December 21st – Fall 2014 (current) and Spring 2015 courses inactivated and copied.
Please note that large courses (those over 1GB) are on a delayed migration schedule, to provide time for those courses to be reduced in size prior to migration. Instructors with courses over 1GB in size will be contacted by the transition team to assist them with the size reduction process in a timely fashion.
If you have any questions about this process, please email oak@vanderbilt.edu.