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Scheduled Maintenance – Sunday, November 9, 6-11am

Nov. 7, 2014—OAK will be unavailable Sunday, November 9th, between 6am and 11am for scheduled maintenance. (Many Vanderbilt systems will be unavailable during this window because of necessary database updates by VUIT.)

Managed Hosting Transition Schedule

Oct. 31, 2014—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...

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...