Pitt Information Technology will perform network maintenance on Saturday–Sunday, May 16–17 during the standard downtime period. Maintenance begins at 11 p.m. on Saturday and will conclude by 7 a.m. on Sunday.

University systems will be unavailable at times during the maintenance period. Affected systems include myPitt (my.pitt.edu), University websites, and systems that require authentication through Pitt Passport.

If you encounter any network issues or experience problems accessing servers at the Network Operations Center after the maintenance period, please report them as soon as possible to the Technology Help Desk at 412-624-HELP (4357).

Effective Friday, May 1, University Zoom meetings recorded to the cloud will be integrated with Lecture Capture (Panopto), the University’s service for storing and sharing recorded lectures, training sessions, demonstrations, and meetings. The upgrade also makes it easier for instructors to share recorded Zoom lectures with their students via the Panopto Course Navigation link in the Canvas course.

The University of Pittsburgh’s enterprise Zoom agreement already includes robust data protections designed for research and education organizations. Integration with Panopto provides additional security options for your recorded meetings, including more granular options for sharing recorded meetings—either with anyone or only with specific individuals.

Meetings created on or after May 1 that are recorded to the Zoom cloud will be automatically uploaded to Panopto. Recordings of meetings that were created via Zoom or Blackboard are stored in your Panopto My Folder in a sub-folder named Meeting Recordings. You can control access to your recorded meetings by setting sharing permissions on the Meeting Recordings folder. Additionally, recordings of meetings that were created via Canvas can be automatically stored in the Panopto folder associated with the course, if one has already been created.

For additional details, please visit our Information Technology website.

The University Center for Teaching and Learning and Pitt IT want to ensure that students and instructors are prepared to use a better, more modern Learning Management System (Canvas).

Please be aware of the following important dates:

• Now – Summer and fall courses are available and accessible in Canvas.
• May 4, 2020 – The University’s learning management system transitions to Canvas from CourseWeb (Blackboard Learn) beginning with the summer 2020 term. Note: Instructors are encouraged to make every effort to transition their courses to Canvas. However, should current circumstances require additional time, a temporary extension is available for summer courses through the Student Information System (PeopleSoft). Find details at https://teaching.pitt.edu/canvas/temporary-lms-extension-available/.
• Fall 2020 – Canvas will be the learning management system for all courses during the fall 2020 term. Late in the fall 2020 term, CourseWeb will be fully retired and no longer be available. Details are available at teaching.pitt.edu/canvas.

You can log in to canvas.pitt.edu at any time to become comfortable with the interface and menu structure.

Note for Instructors: You can also create courses from scratch. Whether you will teach in the summer 2020 term, fall term, or will be on sabbatical, learning how to work in Canvas now makes it easier for you to create and manage your courses. The University Center for Teaching and Learning is ready to assist you with the following resources:

• Canvas training opportunities on how to migrate content from Blackboard, as well as building content from the ground up
• Individual one-on-one assistance
• 24/7/365 online support from Canvas

Learn more about next steps to transition your courses to Canvas by visiting teaching.pitt.edu/canvas today.

Please contact the Technology Help Desk at 412-624-HELP (4357) if you have any questions regarding this announcement.

1:07 p.m., Wednesday, April 15, 2020

The issue that affected CourseWeb last night has been resolved and remains stable. Full service has been restored.

9:57 p.m., Tuesday, April 14, 2020