Campus officials sent the following messages to faculty and students Tuesday night (May 24) to update them on the continuing SmartSite outage and the steps being taken by Undergraduate Education and Information and Educational Technology:

Message to students

Dear UC Davis Students,

The SmartSite system went down on Friday, May 20, at 9 p.m. The outage is continuing, and although we are actively working to resolve the situation, we are proceeding as though the vendor that hosts SmartSite will not be able to restore access by the end of the quarter. We write with the following updates.

Your grades are safe. Although the Web interface is down, your grades are stored in a secure database, and we are devoting all available IT resources to extracting the data for your instructors. We will make that information available to your instructors by this weekend.

We expect that your final grades will be posted on schedule. When they are posted, you will be able to view them via MyUCDavis.

Thank you for your patience.

Sincerely,

Carolyn Thomas     
Vice Provost and Dean, Undergraduate Education

Viji Murali
Chief Information Officer and Vice Provost, Information and Educational Technology

Message to faculty

To All UC Davis Faculty:

The SmartSite system went down on Friday, May 20, at 9 p.m. The outage is continuing, and although we are actively working to resolve the situation, we are proceeding as if the vendor that hosts SmartSite will not be able to restore access by the end of the quarter. We write with the following updates:

1. Extracting existing grade data — All available IT resources have been committed to extracting existing gradebook data and creating a means by which instructors can access assignment grades for this quarter. Our goal is to make this information available to instructors this Friday, May 27. Because our priority is extracting grade data, we will not be able to retrieve other materials at this time.  We will explore that possibility after final grades are posted.
2. Submission of final grades — Final grades can be submitted to the registrar's office via the alternative methods described here: http://classes.ucdavis.edu/grading/.
3. Alternative delivery of learning materials to students — We encourage you to make learning materials available and we have posted instructions and guidelines for using online platforms to deliver your course learning materials to http://smartsite.ucdavis.edu. IT Express is available to support you in posting materials to Box.com (http://box.com). Please call 754-HELP or see http://itexpress.ucdavis.edu/.

Please forward this message to your TAs, readers, graders, staff and all who are involved in your teaching and support teams.

Sincerely,

Carolyn Thomas     
Vice Provost and Dean, Undergraduate Education

Viji Murali
Chief Information Officer and Vice Provost, Information and Educational Technology