We have received a notice from our Information Services:
“WebCT will not be available Saturday 5th February 06:00 to Sunday 6th February 16:00 (With a further 6 hour At Risk period from 16:00) AND again Saturday 19th February 06:00 to Sunday 20th February 16:00 (With a further 6 hour At Risk period from 16:00).
We apologise for the inconvenience this will cause. It is due to ongoing refurbishment work at Kings Buildings [our Science campus] which will result in an outage period for the majority of the University services over these two weekends. More details are available at the URL below. http://tinyurl.com/6e7fd63“
We have registered our concern about this , as we don’t think this sort of unavailability is acceptable, particularly for online and part-time students, but I’m afraid we are unlikely to be able to change the scheduled outage.
So please, if you are intending to do work on the weekend of 5/6 February and 19/20 February, try to plan ahead a bit and download any course materials beforehand.
You will still be able to use your course wikis, Twitter and Second Life to talk to each other, though you won’t be able to log in to the Hub or the Library Catalogue as EASE will not be working.
Please accept our apologies for this – and be reassured we are doing our best to make a case for it not happening again.
Thank you for passing on this information with plenty of notice for us to download material if need be. I will be taking your advice as not being able to access WebCT for essentially two weekends is as you say, not ideal for online part-time students..
For those taking IDEL, the second weekend of outage will correspond to the transition between work on virtual worlds and work on VLEs, PLEs and e-portfolios in weeks 6&7. That section of the course (guest tutored by me) has a fair bit of reading to do up front before discussions and activities start, so as long as you can download the readings in advance, you should find you can get a good start on the topic even without access to WebCT.