EduCat will be unavailable beginning approximately 8:00 am on Sunday, May 12th. EduCat will be available again to everyone no later than 5:00 pm Tuesday, May 14th .

At the end of each semester, the course management system must be taken offline in order for the concluded semester’s courses to be archived. After archiving is complete, the courses on the server are reset, which removes semester-specific data such as course rosters, e-mail, discussion comments, and student submissions. Course elements that may be used from semester-to-semester (e.g., assignments, assessments, learning modules, course content home pages) are not affected by resetting.

2. Archived Courses

If there is anything you do not wish to be visible on the archive server, please hide the item(s) in your EduCat course prior to Sunday, May 12th at 8:00 am.

Archived EduCat courses containing student data will be made available in a read-only mode on the archive server shortly after the course backups, archives, and maintenance have been completed. Instructors and students have access to archived EduCat courses for a period of 2 years at https://archive-educat.nmu.edu/ .

3. Summer Course Requests

If you would like to use EduCat for any Summer courses, please remember to complete course requests at http://myweb.nmu.edu/faculty if you have not already done so.

4. CITE Summer Hours: May 6 – August 16

• Mondays – Thursdays: 10am-4:30pm
• Fridays: 10am – 3pm

Please note:

• EduCat courses must be requested for each semester they are used.  As an instructor, you will see courses from previous semesters in your Course List, and you can make updates to them at any time. However, until an EduCat request is submitted and processed for a specific semester, the EduCat course is not linked to Banner, the system that manages course rosters. Without that link, students cannot access your course.
• The EduCat request form allows you to request EduCat courses for the course sections to which you are assigned.  It also enables you to combine more than one of your sections into a single course in EduCat.  Some faculty “team teach” and combine sections assigned to multiple instructors. Some departments use a single EduCat course for many sections of a lab. The EduCat request form does not provide a means for documenting special requests such as those. If you have such a need, in addition to completing the EduCat Class Request, you must also send an e-mail that details your needs to cite@nmu.edu . We will not carry over special requests from previous semesters. Please send us a detailed e-mail request even if what we define as a special request is an established practice in your area.
• Processing EduCat course requests is a manual process and requires some turnaround time.  We had more than 1,100 requests this semester and are anticipating a similarly high number for Fall 2013.   We process requests as quickly as possible, but recommend submitting your requests at least a few days in advance of when you need them completed.

In most cases, unless default settings have been changed, NMU laptops will update the time automatically within a few minutes of startup. If a student starts up their computer, and attempts to take a quiz in EduCat before the time has been updated, they will receive the following message:

“A time problem has been detected! The clock on your computer and the clock on the server are more than 5 minutes apart.  Please fix the clock on your computer before attempting the quiz!”

To change the clock on the computer, the student should:

1) Click on the time displayed on the lower-right hand corner of the screen.

2) Click “Change date and time settings…”

3) Click the “Internet Time” tab.

4) Click the “Change Settings” button.

5) Click the “Update Now” button.

To resolve the problem in OSX:

1) Click on the time displayed on the upper-right hand corner of the screen.

2) Click ”Open Date & Time Preferences”

3) Click to uncheck “Set date and time automatically:”

4) Click again to Check “Set date and time automatically:”

5) Close the window.

After changing the time, the student can continue taking the quiz.

If you have any questions, please contact the CITE at cite@nmu.edu or extension 2483.

1. EduCat Outage Planned 

   EduCat will be unavailable beginning  approximately 8:00 am on Thursday, December 20^th .  EduCat will be available again to everyone no later than 5:00 pm Friday, December 21^st.At the end of each semester, the course management system must be taken offline in order for the concluded semester’s courses to be archived. After archiving is complete, the courses on the server are reset, which removes semester-specific data such as course rosters, e-mail, discussion comments, and student submissions. Course elements that may be used from semester-to-semester (e.g., assignments, assessments, learning modules, course content home pages) are not affected by resetting.

2. Archived Courses 

   If there is anything you do not wish to be visible on the archive server, please hide the item(s) in your EduCat course prior to Thursday, December 20^th at 8:00 am.Archived EduCat courses containing student data will be made available in a read-only mode on the archive server shortly after the course backups, archives, and maintenance have been completed. Instructors and students have access to archived EduCat courses for a period of 2 years at https://archive-educat.nmu.edu/ .

3. Winter Course Requests 

   If you would like to use EduCat for any Winter courses, please remember to complete course requests at http://myweb.nmu.edu/faculty if you have not already done so.  Note that the CITE will be closed from December 21 – January 1, and we will not be processing requests during that time.  If you need a new course created and plan to work on it during that time, be sure to request it early this week.

4. CITE Hours 

   Week of January 2-4:  Wednesday 10am-5pm, Thursday 10am-5pm, Friday 10am-3pm
   Week of January 7-11: Monday – Friday 10am-5pm
   We will resume regular hours on Monday, January 14^th.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

In most cases, unless default settings have been changed, NMU laptops will update the time automatically within a few minutes of startup. If a student starts up their computer, and attempts to take a quiz in EduCat before the time has been updated, they will receive the following message:

“A time problem has been detected! The clock on your computer and the clock on the server are more than 5 minutes apart.  Please fix the clock on your computer before attempting the quiz!”

To change the clock on the computer, the student should:

1) Click on the time displayed on the lower-right hand corner of the screen.

2) Click “Change date and time settings…”

3) Click the “Internet Time” tab.

4) Click the “Change Settings” button.

5) Click the “Update Now” button.

 
To resolve the problem in OSX:

1) Click on the time displayed on the upper-right hand corner of the screen.

2) Click “Open Date & Time Preferences”

3) Click to uncheck “Set date and time automatically:”

4) Click again to Check “Set date and time automatically:”

5) Close the window.

 
After changing the time, the student can continue taking the quiz.

If you have any questions, please contact the CITE at cite@nmu.edu or extension 2483.

Impact to you: Users already in the system at that time would have lost access when navigating to a new page. Users attempting to access EduCat at that time would have seen a “not available” error message.

Cause: The network card on the server failed.

Resolution: One of the server administrators was on campus when the card failed.  The card was replaced, and the server was back online within 15 minutes.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Should you have any questions related to this outage, please contact the CITE at cite@nmu.edu or x2483.

Both the CITE and the Help Desk  have had several reports this week of students having trouble taking exams using the Respondus LockDown Browser.  Older versions of the LockDown Browser will no longer work, and will result in errors when students attempt to use it to take EduCat quizzes.

If you were issued a new notebook this fall or have re-imaged your notebook within the last few weeks, your Lockdown Browser should work.  If you are using an older version, then prior to your first EduCat quiz you should uninstall the old version and reinstall the old version.  Follow these instructions to complete that process.

We also recommend that instructors set up an ungraded practice quiz so that students can verify that they can complete a quiz without technical difficulties prior to the first graded quiz.

If you have questions, students may contact the Help Desk at helpdesk@nmu.edu or 227-2468. Instructors may contact the CITE at cite@nmu.edu.

Students with courses in only one version will be sent to the appropriate system upon login.  Students with courses in both versions will be prompted with the following: “One or more of your courses is being delivered using the new version of EduCat.  To access your course(s) in the current version, select CURRENT from the version drop-down menu. To access your course(s) in the new version, select NEW from the version drop-down menu.  Unfortunately, once you are done with one system, you will need to log out and log back in to get to the other system.  Thank you for your patience as we transition to the new version of EduCat.”

Instructors using the current version to deliver their summer courses will be prompted with the following: “If you wish to access the courses you are teaching this summer, select CURRENT from the version drop-down menu.  If you would like to develop or revise a course being delivered during the fall semester or later, please select NEW from the version drop-down menu. Unfortunately, once you are done with one system, you will need to log out and log back in to get to the other system.  Thank you for your patience as we transition to the new version of EduCat.”

At the start of the fall semester, all courses will be in the new version of EduCat.

There are two main reasons for upgrading EduCat to Moodle version 2:

1.  Version 1.9 is approaching the end of its lifecycle. Additional development (e.g., feature enhancements) is no longer being done for 1.9, and the Moodle core team plans to stop issuing security updates for 1.9 at some point this year.
2. Moodle 2 includes significant enhancements, including some features that faculty have previously requested be added to EduCat. Rubrics will be available for most activities, activities will be easy to duplicate (so once you have an activity with your preferred settings you can copy it rather than starting from a blank slate), and items on the topic outline can be arranged by dragging and dropping them. It also includes a mobile theme that will allow students and faculty to more easily access many features using smart phones.

Upgrading EduCat to the Moodle 2 platform will be much more straightforward than the conversion from WebCT to EduCat was. Courses will be moved to the upgraded system automatically. For current EduCat users, there will be some learning curve associated with adjusting to the upgraded system, but it should not be steep. Although there are some changes to existing features and file management is handled a bit differently, the basic appearance of EduCat will not significantly change. New features, as mentioned above, will provide additional functionality within the system.

We will be communicating information about the EduCat upgrade to you through several channels, including:

• Holding overview presentations for faculty. that outline the differences between the current version of the system and the upgraded system.
• Publishing articles here on the  EduCat blog that highlight changes and new features.
• Updating our online reference resources for faculty and students.
• Updating our regularly offered EduCat workshops.
• E-mailing faculty about workshop dates, implementation dates, and other important information.

There is also an “EduCat Upgrade” discussion forum within our “NMU EduCat Discussions” site on the Share server. We encourage faculty to post questions or comments to that forum.

Several faculty have asked for  a more full-featured demo student to be added to EduCat.  We are  happy to announce that each instructor now has the ability to log in with a student “demo” ID. Your demo student ID is your regular username with demo- added ahead of it.  Your demo student  password is your regular NMU password.

For example, to log in as a demo student, a user who normally logs in with the username homer and the password 12donuts would log in with username demo-homer and the password 12donuts

The first time that you log in with your demo student ID, a demo student will be added to all of your courses. Your demo student can do and see the same things in your courses that your real students can.  After viewing your course as your demo student, to view your course in your normal instructor role you will either need to log out and log back in with your regular username, or log in with a different browser (e.g., you could log in as yourself on Firefox and your demo student in Chrome).

If you have questions about using the demo student, please contact the CITE at x2483 or cite@nmu.edu.