Sent to the UC Merced community Thursday, March 19, 2020
Dear Campus Community,
This evening between midnight and 6 a.m., the Office of Information Technology (OIT) will be working with our network service provider (CENIC) to effectively double our campus internet bandwidth by adding an additional communications circuit. We are taking this proactive measure to allow for increased traffic and bandwidth demand that the move to completely remote instruction and work will require. We anticipate two momentary disruptions to campus network availability sometime between midnight and 4 a.m. as the circuit is verified and tested.
While we do not expect that this change will cause any other significant impact to our users, there is always some risk associated with this kind of work. However, should there be any unexpected outage due to this change, we’ll communicate it via the OIT Twitter account, which is also accessible via the main page of the OIT website.
We also wanted to take this opportunity to announce a few current efforts to help support faculty during their move to online instruction:
- We have secured an enterprise-level Zoom license for the UC Merced campus and we will be proactively provisioning accounts for all faculty, students, and staff that do not already have one. Watch your email for a confirmation email from Zoom over the next few days.
- We are in the process of securing 550 faculty and instructor licenses for Camtasia, a robust screen recorder and video editing tool that can be used to create instructional videos. You can request your license here and be in the queue when we begin provisioning those licenses next week.
- We have added a Chat function to the OIT website to assist in quick questions associated with the move to remote teaching, learning, and working. You can find it on the bottom right corner of any page on the OIT website.
- We have created and are continuing to add to a set of web pages dedicated to educational continuity for faculty, students, and staff, as well as pages of curated, crowd-sourced resources associated with teaching online for faculty and learning online for students.
OIT is committed to supporting the campus community during this challenging period. Be safe and be well!
Sincerely,
Ann Kovalchick
Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer
