Dear Q-Review users,

We wish to apologise for the recent unplanned Q-Review outages experienced on two separate occasions – the first on Saturday, 14th May 2016 and again on Saturday, 4th June 2016. These outages resulted in users not being able to play back lecture recordings for several hours during the first incident, and intermittently during the second. Both outages took place outside of normal operating hours, and we are currently looking at ways to account for out of hours support during such events.

IT Services technicians have been carrying out investigations with our suppliers, Echo360, to understand the root cause and to put in place measures to ensure that this does not occur again. The Q-Review servers will be updated with the latest patch from our Echo360 suppliers on Tuesday, 14th June 2016, during normal at risk time of 7-9am, and we are advised that this will bring our servers up to date and reduce the likelihood of similar outages in future. After this has been applied, our technicians will continue to monitor the service closely. There will also be a scheduled outage on Tuesday, 5th July 2016, during normal at risk times, while the database is moved to a new server.

If you continue to experience any problems with Q-Review lecture recordings, please report these via the IT Services Helpdesk on https://helpdesk.qmul.ac.uk – where several related tickets will raise an alarm and be escalated to appropriate personnel. 

We apologise for any inconvenience that these outages have caused, especially during an already anxious time for our students, and we thank you for your continued patience whilst we work with our technicians to improve the service and ensure that this does not occur again.

Regards,
Alysa Bramble (Senior Learning Technologist, E-Learning Applications)

On behalf of the E-Learning Unit and IT Services teams