October 7, 2020

This message is distributed to All-Instructors, Academic-Assistant-Deans, and Academic-Department-Managers.  (Click here to view description of distribution groups.)  
The following is being sent on behalf of the Instructional Support Team

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Dear Colleagues,

 

This week’s update features information on network reliability and access to online resources and campus space.

 

GauchoSpace performance and reliability update 

Prior to the start of the quarter, the GauchoSpace team migrated the service to a new web-server with expanded capacity in order to address the increased demands of remote instruction (particularly those related to many synchronous Zoom sessions and timed quizzes). Following the migration, we’ve been experiencing degraded performance and instability, especially during peak times at the beginning of classes. The GauchoSpace team has been addressing these performance issues when they emerge and working to identify the root cause, which we believe to be a configuration issue. Following configuration changes, the service remained stable and responsive all day on Tuesday, October 6. However, until the root cause is fully identified and resolved, there may be short periods when GauchoSpace performance is degraded or the site appears briefly unresponsive. We appreciate your patience as we work towards fully resolving these issues.

 

International Student Access to Campus Online Resources

Some international students may have difficulties accessing some UCSB licensed resources. The campus is working on a more robust solution for this issue. We hope to have a solution in place in the next two to three weeks. In the meantime, we strongly suggest that you encourage students to install the campus VPN client, Pulse Secure Campus VPN, and use that to make accessing these online resources more reliable. Information on installing and using Pulse VPN is available at: https://www.it.ucsb.edu/network-infrastructure-services/pulse-secure-campus-vpn

 

Students specifically having trouble accessing campus Gmail and other Google services should send an email to help@collaborate.ucsb.edu for assistance.

 

On Campus Remote Teaching Spaces for TAs and Teaching Associates

The Library, Instructional Development, Office of the Registrar, and the Executive Vice Chancellor’s Office have partnered to make spaces in the Library and in HSSB available for TAs who require a private, quiet space with reliable wireless or wired networking in order to conduct remote teaching sessions. Reservations for the use of these spaces is open via the following pages:

 

Please pay close attention to the information about technology available in each space to ensure that the space that you reserve meets your needs. If you will use any of the HSSB classrooms and plan on using the installed classroom computer instead of your own laptop, please send an email to id-mediakeys@ucsb.edu as soon as possible to obtain login credentials for a classroom computer.

 

For instructional consultation, contact:

Linda Adler-Kassner: ladler@ucsb.edu (click here to make an appt) 

Lisa Berry: lisa_berry@ucsb.edu - Instructional Development

Mindy Colin: mindy.colin@ucsb.edu - Instructional Development

Maggie Safronova (m_safronova@ucsb.edu) - CITRAL

 

We’ll be in touch next week!

The Instructional Support Team