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Technology Enhanced Learning Team

Upgrades and Releases

In order to keep an up-to-date, secure system and to enhance functionality within the learning environment, we must regularly maintain and upgrade QMplus. Newer versions bring richer features, more reliability and a better user experience.

On this page you’ll find more information about how we manage these changes and communicate about them.

Our scheduled 'At Risk' time

We have a scheduled at risk period for QMplus which is on Tuesdays between 9pm and 11pm. We reserve the right to use this time to make changes to QMplus.

The changes we make during this time are generally relatively small and include things like:

  • Applying security patches to keep the system stable and secure
  • Updating existing plugins or installing new ones, including our own in-house developments

While the at risk period is 2 hours, we try to keep the amount of time QMplus is offline to a minimum.

We do not make changes to QMplus during the official QMUL exam periods. These dates are published in the university calendar on the QMUL website.

We publicise any disruption to QMplus in a number of ways:

  • Messages on the IT Services Status page. All changes requiring downtimes must be communicated via this page.
  • Status alerts on QMplus itself.
  • Messages in our Learning Technologists Group Team on Microsoft Teams.
  • Information on our website.

Our annual QMplus upgrade

While our releases are relatively small, we do have to upgrade the whole of QMplus itself on a regular basis. We generally do this every summer. The upgrade usually brings lots more changes to the system than a release.

The upgrade takes longer than a release and requires a longer downtime for QMplus. We cannot normally manage an upgrade within our usual 2 hour at risk period.

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