Good evening, all,

A joint email from Interim Provost Eric Leshinskie and Faculty Association leadership welcoming faculty back to the semester is below. I hope you have all had a chance to read the last email from the Chancellor with the exciting news that password reset is ready allowing access to Canvas and your district email again!

Thank you all for being patient while IT worked tirelessly to get us to this point. Updates will be sent as things develop, so watch your email or access the status update site.

Stay well,

Patrice Nango
Faculty Association President

Email from the Office of the Interim Provost

Chandler-Gilbert | Estrella Mountain | GateWay | Glendale | Mesa | Paradise Valley

Phoenix | Rio Salado | Scottsdale | South Mountain | Maricopa Corporate College

Dear Faculty,

We hope this message finds you safe and that you are doing well despite what we all realize are very challenging personal and professional circumstances. We want to sincerely thank you for your patience throughout the week. Communication is coming to you from many angles and, when email is interrupted, it makes communication even more challenging. But, we are pleased to share that Maricopa is moving in a positive direction for a successful restart of the spring semester on Monday, March 29.

Password reset 

Earlier this afternoon, you should have received either a text, personal email, and/or work email regarding the necessary steps to reset your password. Steps were outlined for the Self Service option; however, if you are unable to use the Self Service option, you can use the chat feature on the idme.maricopa.edu website to verify your identity in order to have a password link sent to you. The chat support will be available for faculty and staff today until 10:00 p.m. Please note, you may experience a short wait while our chat teams work to get employees verified. Chat support will also be available Friday (7am-10pm), Saturday (8am-8pm), and Sunday (8am-8pm). Please have your government-issued ID available via webcam for verification purposes. The chat feature can also assist you with questions regarding the multi-factor authentication.

Canvas Access

Once you have reset your password, you will be able to access Canvas. We encourage you to do so as quickly as you can to make any necessary adjustments. We do know some students currently have access to Canvas, and all students will receive instructions to reset passwords Friday morning. Messaging, co-developed by our LMS Core Team, FEC Leadership, and the ASA Division, has been placed in Canvas to provide information for students.

Flexibility and Care

We all recognize that this has been a challenging situation and has disrupted instruction. We also understand that despite our best communication efforts, students may still have challenges through Monday and beyond. We respectfully recommend the following for your consideration:

Reflect on your chosen due dates for quizzes/tests this week. We anticipate that Monday and Tuesday may have students still reconnecting, but we hope not many. A slight delay in when work is expected to be submitted or completed may go a long way in easing student concerns. Although the final decision is yours, we strongly urge you not to set any hard deadlines before Wednesday (3/31) to avoid penalizing students suffering through the same technology and connectivity issues that have affected all of us this week.

For those 8-week classes now scheduled to commence on 3/29, please do not immediately drop a student as a no-show on day one or day two. We request you allow until Wednesday before doing so, and we encourage you to keep the lines of communication as open as possible with your students.

Faculty communication is our most effective way to reach students. You know your students best.  Please reach out to them as frequently as you can, reassuring them that we care about their success and are available to support them during this challenging time. In particular, please try to contact any student who has not returned to your class since spring break. It is possible they need help, and your voice might be the one that keeps them engaged and learning.

Collaboration and Support

We have learned from our response to the pandemic that we are stronger together. As we restart instruction on March 29, we will be better able to support our students if we collaborate and support each other. Please reach out to the adjunct faculty in your divisions/departments to see if they need assistance. Rely on your local CTLs, Faculty Developers, and colleagues who can help you with Canvas needs. Connect with your division/department chairs for updates and information. Consult your Dean or VPAA with questions or if additional support is needed. Collectively, we responded well to supporting our students when we returned to instruction one year ago. We are very confident that collectively, we will do the same this year.

Finally, as we all are experiencing stress and uncertainty, please do take time to take care of yourself.  We have all been moving at a non-stop pace for the past year. Take time for you…for each other…so we can collectively support our students.

Please note a second communication will be sent Friday, March 26, with detailed information about the optional semester extension.

Sincerely,

Patrice Nango, Faculty Association President
Sasha Radisich, Faculty Association President-elect
Eric Leshinskie, Interim Provost

Colleagues,

Sunday’s communication (March 21) from the Chancellor can be found at the end of this email.  Please read it carefully as it contains some important updates. 

Key points of the Chancellor’s email include: 

• We do not yet have a timetable as to when access will be restored but anticipate a solution in the coming days.  The ITS department will provide updates as soon as they are able.  
• Classes have been delayed until March 29, but employees are expected to continue their scheduled work on March 22.  Faculty and staff should work with their direct supervisor to determine the level and scope of work that can be completed.
• To avoid a negative impact on IT’s efforts to resolve the system outage, please direct all media calls and requests to Matt Hasson, Chief Communications Officer at matthew.hasson@domail.maricopa.edu.

We also appreciate the incredible work of our ITS professionals. They are working tirelessly to restore our systems and bring us back online. As noted above, we don’t have a date for the system reset and renewed access to email, Canvas, Webex, and MS 365. However, you should expect a disruption of access and, when provided with instructions, a requirement to create 2 factor ID verification and to reset your password. 

As the Chancellor acknowledged in his email, we know that many of us are frustrated and would like additional details and answers to our questions about the network outage and its impacts on our students, faculty, and employees. Faculty Association leadership is actively working to acquire and share timely information, including seeking and providing answers to questions submitted to our Systems Outage Questions form. We appreciate those sending questions and will continue to seek answers in our daily meetings with the Chancellor’s Executive Council (CEC). College Faculty Senate Presidents will communicate with their faculty and share these questions and answers as well as any updates from the special meeting for the Faculty Senate Presidents and FEC Officers later this afternoon to discuss their concerns, questions, and current updates.  

In order to prevent unintended filtering of our emails sent to your personal email address, please follow these whitelisting instructions. In addition to our emails, all updates are posted regularly on the Faculty Association website. We also recommend that you continue to check Maricopa’s System Status web page for updates. 

Stay well, 

Patrice Nango

Faculty Association PresidentI

From: Office of the Chancellor <chancellor@domail.maricopa.edu>

Date: Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 3:02 PM

Subject: Message from the Interim Chancellor

To:

Chandler-Gilbert | Estrella Mountain | GateWay | Glendale | Maricopa Corporate College

Mesa | Paradise Valley | Phoenix | Rio Salado | Scottsdale | South Mountain

Dear Colleagues,

I want to provide you with an update on where we are and what to expect in the coming week as it relates to the system outage.  But first, I want to express my sincere appreciation and support to our ITS professionals who are working tirelessly to restore our systems and bring us back online.

I understand that many of you are frustrated and would like additional details regarding the current network outage. In our response, we are guided by standard incident protocols and are committed to addressing all IT related outages in a secure and responsible way, which includes the sharing of information both when it is validated and safe to do so. While not ideal, it is critical to getting our systems back online in a safe and secure manner.

Here’s what I am able to share right now.

On Tuesday, March 16, we identified suspicious activity within our IT network. As soon as this activity was detected, we implemented our incident response protocols, disconnected external access to our network, and took systems offline. To protect our network and address the issue, we engaged our key partners, including forensic and recovery specialists, to help us determine what happened and resolve the outage.

The initial results from our investigation indicate that the suspicious activity appears related to the early stages of a cyberattack.  We continue to investigate this situation while simultaneously restoring applications to ensure system security. We are working with our forensic partners to ensure our systems are secure so we can reestablish connectivity and resume business as usual.

We are working as quickly as possible to solve this problem and safely restore access to all applications and email. We do not yet have a timetable as to when access will be restored but will let you know as we have more information. Unfortunately, this process takes time.

We anticipate a solution in the coming days that will be communicated as soon as we are able. Please keep an eye out for messages from our ITS department who will provide updates on how we bring our systems and your access back online. I ask that we give them the time to focus on these solutions and avoid contacting them with questions.  Please wait for their messages.

Although we have delayed the start of classes to March 29, we do expect employees to proceed with their scheduled work on March 22 to the best of your ability.  We recognize it is challenging to perform normal duties and responsibilities with limited or no access to technology tools and systems; however, we ask that faculty and staff work with your direct supervisor to determine the level and scope of work that can be completed.

Finally, there is quite a bit of media interest in our system outage.  Media is contacting employees and students for comment because we are limited in what we can share with them at this point. Please understand, anything you share with the media could have an impact on the work our IT experts are doing to resolve the situation and is not helpful. Please direct all media calls to Matt Hasson, Chief Communications Officer for the district, matthew.hasson@domail.maricopa.edu.

Thank you for your continued patience and understanding during this time. You have all been through so much this past year and have excelled in every endeavor. We will get through this and we will learn where there is a lesson, and we will grow where there is opportunity.

Please continue to visit our website for timely updates: https://www.maricopa.edu/system-status.

Sincerely,

Steven