CTL Blog

CoursePlus Outage on Friday, December 20, 2013

December 20, 2013 | 1 Minute Read

CoursePlus was unavailable from approximately 11:10am until 12:35pm today, Friday, December 20, 2013. The cause of the problem was the School's master course catalog database. CoursePlus is deeply tied to the School's master course catalog database. CoursePlus cannot operate without the inforation in the School's master course catalog database. The course catalog database was being updated this morning with course information for the 2014-2015 academic year, and in the process, data about courses in the current acdemic year was removed. As a result, problems with the School's master course catalog database caused problems in CoursePlus and no courses were listed in CoursePlus and no one could sign in to CoursePlus to get access to their courses.

Online courses were not affected by this problem, and students could access online courses without issue during this time. If a student relied on accessing online courses through CoursePlus only, and never browsed to the online courses website at http://distance.jhsph.edu/, the student likely would have thought the online courses inaccessible as well.

We know that it was very frustrating for CoursePlus to be down on this, the last day of the term, and we apologize for the downtime. We just could not run CoursePlus without the data from the School's course catalog.