Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
We are aware of an issue where some email copies of receipts for work submitted in Blackboard are being significantly delayed in reaching students, who may then be concerned that their submission has not been properly completed.
Students can always access their receipt number by re-opening the submission within the Blackboard course. The receipt number is shown at the top right:
The issue has been raised with Blackboard and we will provide updates here.
We are aware some staff are unable to add any users to their courses via the class register. We are liaising with Anthology to determine the cause and rectify the issue. If you require users to be added to your course please contact the DEO Helpdesk digital-education@bristol.ac.uk
One of the advantages of our move to Blackboard Ultra is the ongoing potential for new feature releases and updates. New releases take place on the first Thursday evening of every month, which is much more frequently than for Blackboard Original. We will communicate about new features and changes via this blog. If you want to be kept up to date with the latest information, we recommend subscribing to the blog.
This release has new or updated features in the following areas:
These changes impact instructors, students, and administrators. Below you’ll find our highlights, and more detail on the most relevant updates.
Release conditions can now be based on whether a student has opened or started content items. This includes non-assessment items such as documents, media, and course links. An example usage is setting release conditions which require students to open a reading or watch a video before an assessment becomes available.
This update has led to some changes in the release conditions interface, with the term Performance now replaced with Activity. While this change in terminology should be noted, existing functionality for assessment-based release condition rules remains the same.
The Flexible Grading and Submissions pages have been updated to show changes in group membership more clearly.
On the Submissions page, if all members are removed from a group:
For active groups, the Flexible Grading interface always shows the current group members for each attempt.
MathJax support in the Content Editor now includes additional LaTeX delimiters for rendering mathematical formulas. Instructors and students can now use:
These options are in addition to the existing $ delimiters.
Other updates in this release include:
Please see the full Release notes for information on other updates in this release.
For more guidance on using Blackboard Ultra, please explore the Digital Education Development blog.
Students can view an Ultra orientation and advice on using Ultra from their Help for Students sections (or equivalent) in your Blackboard course.
The Re/Play supplier will be updating the EU Mediasite Video Cloud to the latest release during their scheduled maintenance window on 6 December between midnight and 4 am. Extended downtime is not expected, but Re/Play may be unavailable for brief periods during this time.
This is a maintenance release that focuses on stability and user experience. This update includes minor enhancements to Channel functionality, bug fixes, and several small interface tweaks to ensure a more reliable and smoother viewing and management experience.
IT Services will be carrying out an upgrade on the Xerte Server Wednesday 7th January 2026. This will complete postponed work from 1st December.
Access to both the Xerte authoring tool and projects hosted on Xerte will be intermittently available during the day. This may result in students being unable to view published Xerte objects for short periods during that day. We apologise for any inconvenience this downtime may cause.
The Xerte upgrade will take us to Xerte 3.14. This will bring security improvements, bug fixes, and a variety of enhancements to page templates. There are also improvements to accessibility functionality. You can read more about Xerte 3.14 enhancements in its release notes.
The critical work on the Xerte server software has been completed, however the upgrade to version 3.14 has been postponed due to other work being carried out across networks. We will identify a time to upgrade in the new year.
If you encounter any issues with Xerte please contact us.
We are aware of an issue affecting playback when a Re/Play presentation is paused and resumed during recording. Our supplier has identified the cause and is working on a fix, which will be included in a future version update (release date to be confirmed).
The problem appears when users pause and resume recording too quickly. To avoid this, please advise presenters to wait at least 5 seconds between selecting pause and resume.
We’ll provide further updates as soon as the fix is available.
Due to a technical issue with accessing the data on lecture schedules, the Re/Play service encountered a problem which caused a number of automatic recordings to be missed at 9 am today (25 November).
The DEO worked with IT Services and the supplier to address this issue, and the data was restored in time for the 10 am lectures. No further problems are anticipated, but we are monitoring the service and working with IT Services and the supplier to ensure this will not happen again.
If you have any questions, please email the Digital Education helpdesk.
Turnitin has informed us that they updated the AI writing report on 14 October to improve accuracy while keeping false positives to a minimum. This update is part of their ongoing work to respond to the evolution of generative AI.
Previously generated AI writing reports will not be updated retroactively. However, this improvement may result in some changes in AI scores between draft submissions made before the update and final submissions made after the update.
This update is automatically applied to all new submissions to Turnitin assignments and to Blackboard assignments with Turnitin enabled. You will not see any visual changes to the AI writing report or its highlighting, and you do not need to change any settings to benefit from the update.
Although this technology has improved since its release, Turnitin AI writing reports can occasionally produce false positives. This means the report might incorrectly flag text as AI-generated. For this reason, Turnitin results should always be reviewed by subject experts and used as supporting evidence, not as a replacement for academic judgement.
If you have any questions about this update, please message us at digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
IT Services will be carrying out critical maintenance work on the Xerte Server Monday 1st December. This will involve work on the server and an upgrade to Xerte itself.
Access to both the Xerte authoring tool and projects hosted on Xerte will be intermittently available during the day. This may result in students being unable to view published Xerte objects for short periods during that day. We apologise for any inconvenience this downtime may cause.
The Xerte upgrade will take us to Xerte 3.14. This will bring security improvements, bug fixes, and a variety of enhancements to page templates. There are also improvements to accessibility functionality. You can read more about Xerte 3.14 enhancements in its release notes.