MOLE Update

We are pleased to announce that we are moving to a brand new service delivery model for MOLE.

Rather than being hosted on our own servers at the University, MOLE will be hosted by its suppliers, Blackboard, on their servers in Amsterdam.

All content will be migrated across by CiCS working closely with Blackboard, and staff and students will notice no difference in the user experience.

One key difference however, is that in our new service model, Blackboard will provide 24/7 support and maintenance for the running of MOLE. This means that if their monitoring equipment detects poor performance or unusually high utilisation at any time of the day, they will immediately channel additional resource where it is needed so the user experience in Sheffield does not deteriorate. We expect that this will avoid a repeat of the MOLE performance problems we experienced at the start of this academic year.

With this new service delivery model we are hopeful that MOLE will meet the needs of our academic colleagues and their students. The Learning Technologies team in CiCS will now be able to focus their efforts on supporting academics to use the features of MOLE to produce innovative and engaging online content to provide our students with the best learning experience possible.