Dear colleagues,

(With apologies for the length of this email and for cross-posting).

The following message provides important updates about the upgrade plans. Please pass this information on.

Parallel Environment

We previously proposed running parallel environments after the upgrade (i.e. the old 2.2 and 2.6 sites being simultaneously active for a short period), but this has not been possible for various reasons.

There have been technical concerns about running two ‘live’ online learning environments and possible conflicts with external application integration (such as Turnitin). There were questions about how long we would need to keep the two sites ‘live’, and how to ensure that users end up in the right place. With the various user requirements there was no consensus as to the best time to ‘lock down’ the old environment and no guarantee that users would not end up updating information on the wrong environment while they both remained active (as emails and signposting can sometimes be missed or misinterpreted, or may not capture everyone needed).

We have had the opportunity to look at an upgraded version of QMplus over the past two weeks, and feel confident that the look and feel is not significantly different (especially for students) and therefore will not have a great impact on users ability to navigate the new site as they did the old one. There will be new features and functionalities which were not present on the old site and we will add a list of some of these features to our upgrade website soon (link below).

IMPORTANT – What happens now?

As a result of the above news, ALL course areas will be transferred and accessible via the upgraded QMplus environment as of the 17th of July. This means that all users (staff and students) will log into the new QMplus environment (via the same URL – http://qmplus.qmul.ac.uk) after the 17th of July and any current teaching will need to continue in the upgraded environment as it did before the upgrade. Content and activities will be transferred to the new 2.6 upgraded environment (any assignments which were set up on the 2.2 environment, will be brought over to the 2.6 environment).

For example: Courses that run over the upgrade period, i.e. start before the 17th of July AND end after the 17th July (such as post-graduate level courses, or courses requiring resit students to submit coursework) will be accessed via the upgraded QMplus environment. The old 2.2 QMplus environment will not be accessible for live teaching or active participation.

Follow up meetings with ‘flagged’ users:

I will be sending a separate email shortly to users who were identified as having specific issues around the upgrade period (especially those who have courses running over the time period) to schedule a follow up meeting where needed. Feel free to respond to this email to request a follow up meeting, and we will try to accommodate your request.

Previewing a test upgraded QMplus

You will soon be able to preview a test version of the QMplus 2.6 environment. We were aiming to have this access set up for around the end of April – it is looking like it will be ready by the end of next week. Information for how to access will be released soon. It should be noted that there will be restrictions in using this test environment, such as:

The test environment is only available within the College network, for security reasons.
Shibboleth is not currently enabled, so accounts are currently ‘manual’.
Some things will be broken. We are now starting to identify and fix them.
Some integrations/plugins (TII, plagiarism, Q-Review, etc…) are not yet configured.
Performance will not match that of the live production service, although we will look at performance tuning as the project proceeds.
Data will not be backed-up, and there is a risk that any work done in this QMplus test environment may be lost.

More information

I’ve attached a updated version of the proposal which was shared in March. Please review this and refer to the link below for supporting information.

For information about the upgrade plan (before, during and after), including what is meant by read-only and how the upgrade affects the end of year procedures (rolling over courses to the next academic year and archiving old courses), please view our QMplus upgrade ‘go live’ page at:

http://www.learninginstitute.qmul.ac.uk/elearning/about-us/projects/qmplus-upgrade/the-go-live-plan/

Best Wishes,

Alysa