Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 19 July between 09:00 and 15:00.
The purpose of the maintenance is to deploy system updates to ensure the ongoing reliability, security and up time of the platform.
During this time users may experience service disruption. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk
The issue with Xerte reported yesterday has now been resolved. Authors can now see their projects when logged into the authoring portal.
We will continue to closely monitor the service. Please contact us if you experience any issues using the service.
We are aware of an issue with Xerte, where authors preexisting projects are not displayed when logged into the authoring portal. Similarly they cannot create new projects.
Published projects are working as expected, e.g. embedded Xerte projects in Blackboard or using the supplied weblinks.
IT Services have been informed and are investigating the issue. We will provide updates via this blog.
The Mark Approval Tool in Blackboard is now paginated, giving users greater flexibility when viewing student data.
Users with the Marks Extractor role can now choose to display 10, 50, or 100 items per page.
Displaying 10 items per page helps avoid long scrolls.
Choosing 50 or 100 items reduces the need to click through multiple pages.
You can tailor the display to suit your workflow and preferences, which is especially useful when working with larger cohorts.
This improvement makes it easier to locate and select marks before extracting them to eVision/SITS, helping to streamline the process overall.
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 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 improvements impact instructors, students, and administrators. Below you’ll find our highlights, and more detail on the most relevant updates.
Instructors can now add divider blocks to Documents. Dividers provide a clear way to structure a Document into sections. They can be resized to span up to four columns.
Instructors can now create jumbled sentence questions for tests. This question type lets instructors define one or more paragraphs with blanks for students to complete. Additionally, instructors can:
To create a Jumbled Sentence question, enter the question text and define the blanks by enclosing the correct answers in square brackets (see image below).
![Screenshot of creating a jumbled sentence question. The question text reads:
Single water molecules are held together by [covalent] bonds and multiple water molecules are held together by [hydrogen] bonds. The kind of bond where atoms are sharing electrons but are not sharing them equally is [polar covalent bond].](https://blackboard.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/files/2025/06/jumbled-sentence.png)
Please see the Release Notes for further information.
An indicator has been added to the Discussions tab which shows the number of unread discussion posts from anywhere in a course.
Other updates include:
Please see the Release Notes for full details on other updates in this release.
For more guidance on using Blackboard Ultra, please explore Ultra Essential Guidance.
Students can view an Ultra orientation and advice on using Ultra from their Help for Students sections (or equivalent) in your Blackboard course.
Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 21 June between 09:00 and 15:00.
The purpose of the maintenance is to deploy system updates to ensure the ongoing reliability, security and up time of the platform.
During this time users may experience service disruption. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk
Currently, Jumbled Sentence questions are incorrectly copying from Blackboard Original to Blackboard Ultra courses.
This question type is due to be released in Blackboard Ultra on June 6, but currently Jumbled Sentence questions are not supported, and a partial copy is being produced when any attempt is made to copy them (for example, as part of a larger pool or test with multiple questions). These partial copies contain the written element of the question but are not functional.
Until June 6, tests or question pools/banks with Jumbled Sentence questions should be not be copied between Blackboard Original and Ultra courses. After June 6, these can be copied with full functionality expected.
Jumbled Sentence questions that have already been copied will need to be deleted and then re-added after June 6.
Following an update to Blackboard, Jumbled Sentence Questions can now be created in Ultra courses and can be copied from Original courses to Ultra courses without issue.
Turnitin has informed us of an intermittent known issue causing the Blackboard Gradebook to fail to sync with Turnitin. More information can be found on Turnitin’s known issues log.
In the meantime, instructors can continue marking as usual via Turnitin’s Assignment Inbox by entering marks there, and also manually in the Gradebook column for affected students. We also recommend using Turnitin’s Assignment Inbox to check for non-submissions, rather than relying on the Gradebook.
We will provide an update as soon as we have one.
The issue where students and staff could not access some Re/Play recordings through Blackboard course menu links (Re/Play Collections) has been resolved following a software version update applied overnight on 29th April.
We will continue to closely monitor the service.
Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 17 May between 09:00 and 15:00.
The purpose of the maintenance is to deploy system updates to ensure the ongoing reliability, security and up time of the platform.
During this time users may experience service disruption. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk