Latest message from the Provost regarding LEARN

To: All University of Waterloo students

From: Geoff McBoyle, Vice-President, Academic & Provost

Date: February 1, 2013

Subject: Update on Waterloo LEARN

Dear Students,

Our Waterloo LEARN online learning management system is now back online after several days of being unavailable. Your patience through this difficult time has been greatly appreciated. I have received many responses from students to previous communications and understand how frustrating the situation has been for you.

This is by no means the end of the story. This long, unprecedented outage of a vitally important service has caused students and instructors no small amount of anxiety and confusion over the last three days, and no doubt you are looking for answers.

Our top priority is to have a functioning course management system. Over the next week, our colleagues in Information Systems & Technology will be working with Desire2Learn to improve their planning process for upgrades or other changes that involve our system so that the university is aware of the timing and potential risks and can participate in the decision-making process about planned changes. IST will also work with the Faculties on improvements to our own contingency plans.

I am committed to reviewing and investigating this service outage, both the reasons for it and our response to it, and we will take steps to ensure that this situation is not repeated. We will share our findings and recommendations with the campus community at the earliest opportunity.

In the meantime, we have asked that instructors assess the impact of the system outage on their own course activities and respond accordingly, making reasonable accommodations. The Registrar’s Office has also been informed in case of impacts to midterm scheduling.

Please accept my heartfelt apologies for the Waterloo LEARN service interruption.

Sincerely,

Geoff McBoyle

Vice-President, Academic & Provost