Message-ID: <8532343.1182532585416.JavaMail.joeescobar@joe-escobars-computer.local> Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 22:50:57 -0800 (PST) From: moodleadmin Reply-To: Online@lanecc.edu Subject: Message to faculty re DST Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="----=_Part_113_9269053.1182532585416" GWItemID: 45E847E1.LCC-Mail.MC_PO3.100.1346735.1.35E6.1 ------=_Part_113_9269053.1182532585416 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dear Online, Below is a message to faculty about problems I anticipate with the new Daylight Savings Time changeover. I'm still working on the zone fixes to try to resolve this without any manual intervention, but I'm growing increasingly skeptical that I'll be able to fix it. I'd be grateful if you could skim over the message and let me know if you have any suggestions or concerns. David ---- Instructors, I have a couple of items for you, both related to the beginning of Daylight Savings Time. Daylight Savings Time and scheduling issues Most of you are probably aware that the date for starting Daylight Savings Time has shifted forward this year. Instead of the first Sunday in April, we are now switching on the second Sunday in March (March 11th this year). That shift is causing some problems with the scheduling of activities in Moodle. Specifically, during the three week period which previously would have been on Standard Time (Sunday, March 11th - Saturday, March 31st), scheduled activities, like the opening and closing times for quizzes, assignments, lessons, and so forth, will be off by an hour. The calendar will show the correct time for activities, but students won't actually be able to open them until an hour after the scheduled time. That last point is apt to be the source of some confusion: what students see on the schedule won't accurately reflect the actual availability. (This problem won't effect chat sessions, where the scheduled time is actually only advisory.) I am hopeful that we'll be be able to finish a patch for this, but over the past couple of weeks, I've tried all the available suggestions and none have worked. So at this point, I wanted to warn you that we may encounter some problems during the March 11th - March 31st window, and to explain what we'll have to do if I'm unable to fix it. I'll let you know by email early next week whether I'm able to fix the problem, or whether I exhaust the fixes without any success. We may require you to change the availability on some of your activities as a workaround, in which case I'll not only notify you by email, I'll post a notice on the Moodle front page, with a link to the instructions. If we do need you to change the availability, the workaround is pretty straightforward. For any scheduled activity between March 11th and March 31st: - Change the availability by setting the time one hour ahead. If you want a quiz to be available on March 15th from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, change the opening time to 7:00 AM and the closing time to 4:00 PM. - Consider putting the scheduled time for the activity in the title. Change "Quiz 4" to "Quiz 4 3/15/07 8:00 - 5:00," for example. That will help the students remember that the actual availability is different from what they'll see on the schedule. (But: be careful not to make the title of the activity too long, because that can cause some strange formatting problems for the content of the window.) - Also consider warning your students to be careful about assuming when they can access activities. If a student sees "The quiz will not be available until: Monday, 9 April 2007, 12:00 PM," and schedules herself only an hour in which to take and finish the quiz before going to work, that will cause a problem if the quiz isn't actually available until 1:00. Mostly, this should be a communication issue--as long as students understand that the time that shows in the calendar for an event will be off by an hour, there shouldn't be any problem. Moodle downtime, Friday 3/9, 6:00 - 6:30 PM In order to run some final DST tests, we are planning to take Moodle out of service during the usual IT scheduled maintenance window, between 6:00 and 6:30 PM. That will mean that Moodle main page will be up and down. Students may be able to log in during that time, but they will not actually be able to access any classes. That will prevent them from starting a quiz and then having their session disappear out from under them. There are no quizzes currently scheduled to open or close during that time, but if the downtime will cause problems with the avaiability of any activity, please let me know. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know. David Walton =============================================== David Walton Moodle System Administrator Lane Community College For enrollment, course creation, logging in, or general server issues, email moodleadmin@lanecc.edu For faculty assistance using Moodle, email online@lanecc.edu Voice: 463-3367 =============================================== ------=_Part_113_9269053.1182532585416--