Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 17 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
Full transcripts of Re/Play presentations are now available for staff to download. These text files can be downloaded by selecting Download to Computer in a presentation when viewing it in My Re/Play. Transcripts can be accessed by either the presentation owner or anyone with editor or moderator rights.
You may now notice a tag appearing for some presentations, which says ‘edited captions’. A team of Student Caption Editors have been working in the DEO to correct automatic speech recognition errors in some Re/Play presentations.
If you, or someone else in your school, is editing captions, you can now also add the ‘edited captions’ tag in the Information tab in My Re/Play. These tags will be visible to both students and staff in Re/Play collections, and help students to recognise which captions are likely to be more accurate. Ideally, all captions should be checked for key terminology and usability.
If you teach as part of your role at the University, we need to hear from you!
This year, we are participating in the digital experience insights survey for Higher Education teaching staff, created by Jisc to better understand the way that digital tools and practices are used across the UK HE Sector. Jisc is the UK digital, data and technology agency focused on tertiary education, research and innovation. Some of the questions will feed into a national benchmarking exercise run by Jisc; the results of previous surveys can be found from their webpages.
The Digital Education Office, alongside the Digital Learning Environment Review project team, will also be using the survey results to add important data to our review work, as well as identify those areas which are the highest priority for you.
The survey shouldn’t take longer than 10-15 minutes to complete, and is anonymous.
The survey will close on the 15th June.
The interface for Blackboard submissions such as essays, some timed assessments and some exams is changing on June 2, 2023. There is no change to functionality.
After June 2, if students need to upload a submission, this option will be contained within a ‘concertina menu’. This makes the interface less confusing, allowing them to select the options they need without having to navigate the options they don’t.
Below are three images: one showing the current interface and two showing the new interface.
The old interface has all the ‘Attach Files’, ‘Write Submission’ and ‘Add Comments’ functions on display.
The new interface places the same features behind concertina menus.
Once expanded with a click, the same options are available.
IT Services has launched a new software request app for teaching staff. The app has been designed to streamline the process of requesting software for the start of the upcoming academic year and enables you to see previous software requests made by your school.
To ensure your request is ready for the start of teaching in September, please submit your request as soon as possible. The deadline for submission is 16 June 2023.
Access the app and find out more on the Teaching and Student Software SharePoint page.
If you need technical support with the app, please contact the IT Service Desk using the self-service site.
An error has been identified in Blackboard that can affect the display of submitted documents containing footnotes and formatting styles. The error rearranges the footnote order, affecting the marker’s view of the document. The Blackboard developers are aware of the error, and are working on a fix. In the meantime, we recommend that students submit documents in PDF where they contain footnotes.
This error affects the DEO’s “Blackboard Online” workflow, and we have updated the recommendations in our EMA – Blackboard Online Workflow guidance accordingly.
The supplier of the Re/Play service has fixed the issue that was causing some people to have intermittent difficulty accessing videos.
Some people are experiencing intermittent issues when trying to view Re/Play videos, receiving an error message stating “The video could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format cannot be supported.” This has been reported to the supplier of the Re/Play service, who has replicated the issue and is investigating the root cause. They hope to have resolved this soon.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
The Blackboard access issue should now be resolved. If you are still encountering problems on your own device, you can attempt to resolve them by flushing your DNS, using the instructions found on the IT Services status page.
Blackboard has performed maintenance work this morning to improve the reliability and robustness of their network. For some Internet Service Providers (ISPs), this work is taking time to propagate through their networks, resulting in some people having difficulty in accessing Blackboard globally. The issue should resolve itself in time. In the meantime, if you are having difficulty accessing Blackboard, you may be able to resolve this by using a different ISP; for example, you could: