Dear Colleague,

As you know, over the last few weeks, our campus learning management system, ReggieNet, experienced a series of slowdowns and performance disruptions. We at the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology (CTLT) realize how frustrating this has been for many of you and your students. Fortunately, I am now able to report that, thanks to our colleagues in Administrative Technologies (AT), reliability and stability have been restored.

I want to update you on that work and on plans to improve and streamline ReggieNet going forward.

Performance issues
First we want to stress that the recent problems were not with the learning management system, per se, but seem to have been primarily with the database that supports the LMS on the “back end.” Of course, the cause seems unimportant to a frustrated student or fellow instructor, and we greatly appreciate the patience you have shown while our on-campus partners in Administrative Technologies worked with our external vendor on a fix.

While the issue has been resolved, we and our colleagues in AT, will continue to monitor ReggieNet’s performance closely. If you experience any issue with ReggieNet, we ask that you immediately contact the Technology Support Center at supportcenter@IllinoisState.edu and report the problem. Please ask your students to do the same. The Technology Support Center is in the best position to provide immediate assistance to you and your students, and support tickets help us to track developing issues. The more quickly a problem is reported, the more quickly it can be addressed.

Streamlining
As you may have seen in the most recent issue of CTLT’s newsletter, The LINK, ReggieNet will be undergoing some changes starting with the summer
2015 semester. We have decided, however, to roll out these changes more slowly, in order to give you more time to adjust how you use ReggieNet in your teaching.

Starting with summer 2015 classes, you will see a change in the list of “default” tools that appear in new course sites.

  • The Modules tool will be replaced by Lesson Builder (you can still add Modules back manually). This tool and two others will eventually be retired.
  • Discussion Forums is being discontinued; the similarly named Discussions tool will remain.
  • The Blogs tool is being replaced by the Clog (“Community Blog”) tool.

All three of these “new” tools have actually been in use for a while, and many instructors on campus prefer them.

The transition from Modules to Lesson Builder will likely have the greatest impact on your work. Unfortunately, there is no way to automatically transfer old modules into the Lesson Builder, so you will have to recreate your lessons manually in Lesson Builder. I can assure you, however, that our team at the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology stands ready to assist you in your transition to all three of these tools.

Workshops for instructors
We have added several sessions of a new, one-hour workshop, ReggieNet: Migrating Content from Modules to Lesson Builder, to our spring schedule. We will also be including this in our summer programming, which will be announced in early May. You can sign up right now for spring ReggieNet workshops on our ReggieNet Workshop page.

Contact Us
If you can’t make it to a workshop, the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology also maintains a wide range of online help guides, step-by-step instructional videos, and resources to give to your students at CTLT.IllinoisState.edu/Technology/ReggieNet.

And, remember, you can always get instructional support by emailing CTLT@IllinoisState.edu with a question or a request for a face-to-face consultation. You can also call us, weekdays from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., at (309) 438-2542.

We appreciate the patience and support you’ve shown as we continue to make ReggieNet a robust and flexible resource for the enhancement of our students’ learning!

Claire Lamonica signature

Claire C. Lamonica, Director
Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology
Illinois State University