Places are available on Digital Education Office workshops in September onwards. These include: Introduction to Blackboard, Questionmark OnDemand, The Blackboard Grade Centre, Blackboard Collaborate, Designing and creating digital materials, and Video in teaching and learning. See the Digital Education Office events page for more details and to book.
New tool in Blackboard to batch upload feedback
In response to suggestions from staff users, the Digital Education Office has worked with Blackboard to develop an extra tool to make marking quicker by batch uploading feedback documents. To find out more, see this three minute video:
Open video in new window: https://youtu.be/VdRdH8ylB5Y .
For further information please contact the Digital Education Office
Changes to Blackboard for 2019-20
New tool in Blackboard to batch upload feedback
In response to suggestions from staff users, the Digital Education Office has worked with Blackboard to develop an extra tool to make marking quicker by batch uploading feedback documents. To find out more about the tool, see this three-minute video: https://youtu.be/VdRdH8ylB5Y. For further information, or to arrange a demonstration, please contact the Digital Education Office.
New assessment, submission and feedback area in all Blackboard courses
The new assessment, submission and feedback area in all Blackboard unit courses is now available. It provides students with a consistent one-stop-shop for assessment information, online submission, and access to marks and feedback on each of their units. Information can be added and updated at faculty, school or unit level. Where added at faculty or school level, the information needs only to be updated in one place and will then be visible in all units within a faculty or school. If you wish to start using this facility, FEMs, SAMs or GAMs should please nominate two colleagues in the school or faculty to be editors, informing the Digital Education Office, who will then provide training and assign permission to edit.
Non-SITS courses changing to organisations
In order to support the introduction of the Student Lifecycle Support Programme, Blackboard courses that are not linked to a specific unit in SITS are being changed into Blackboard organisations. The content and functioning of these are unaffected, but staff and students will now find them in the My Organisations area rather than My Courses.
If you have questions about any of these changes, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk. For additional information, please see the Digital Education Office website.
Re/Play adding and reusing content.
Following the changes made to the unit codes as part of the SLSP project we are currently investigating a problem where the search functions will not return results for the new unit code catalogs.
There are two ways we would recommend reusing or adding recordings in to Blackboard –
Add Presentation tool –
- Navigate to the content area in the Blackboard course where you would like to add the recording
- Ensure Edit Mode is ON and then select Build Content
- Select Mediasite – Link to presentation(s)
- Enter the name of the presentation you wish to add and select Search Presentations
- tick the box to the left once located and then Submit
- Click OK
- The recording will now be at the bottom of the page and can be moved as required.
Embedding –
- Open Blackboard and select the My Re/Play Tab
- Scroll down and select Share Presentation
- Select Copy if you want to add a link or select Embed and then Copy if you wish to add a responsive video player
- Navigate to the content area in the Blackboard course where you would like to add the recording
- Ensure Edit Mode is ON and then select Build Content
- Select Item
- Give the Item a Name
- To add a link simply paste in to the editor and add descriptive text so your students know what they are looking at and select Submit
- To Embed Select HTML from the bottom row of icons in the editor. If you can not see this click the arrows in the top right. Paste in your Embed code and Update
- Add anything else you want in to the text editor and select Submit
If you do need to add a recording to the catalog for the 19/20 academic session please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk and we will be able to assist.
New Questionmark service now available
Questionmark has now been upgraded to version 6 and the new cloud-based On Demand service is available for use.
Users can log in using the links at:
www.bristol.ac.uk/digital-education/support/tools/questionmark/
Existing content, schedules and users have been migrated into the system.
Support materials are available at:
www.bristol.ac.uk/digital-education/support/tools/questionmark/
If you have any queries please contact the Digital Education Office.
Blackboard upgrade completed, 30 July 9am
The Blackboard upgrade has been completed ahead of schedule, and Blackboard is available again now. The Digital Education Office has tested all key functionality, and is continuing with further in-depth testing.
If you come across anything that isn’t behaving as you expect it to, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Further details of the upgrade, and other DEO developments, can be found on our website.
Changes to your Blackboard courses (units) for 2019/20
As you know, the Student Lifecycle Support Programme is delivering changes to assessment and feedback this year, including the following areas in Blackboard:
- The capability for marks and feedback to be accessed and submitted in Blackboard
- Allowing for marks to be transferred automatically from Blackboard to SITS, saving staff time and reducing the risk of transcription errors.
To enable this, the Digital Education Office will be rolling over Blackboard courses with blank Grade Centres this academic year. This means that any settings currently in Grade Centres, as well as test deployments, will be deleted and will need to be set up again after roll-over. If you have Blackboard courses with complicated Grade Centre settings that need to be copied over, you can opt to have these courses rolled over with the Grade Centres intact; however, you will then need to manually delete parts of the new course in order to make them ready for the new link with SITS. The DEO will advise you on what needs to be done. Please fill in the attached form as soon as possible if you have any courses like this.
Please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk if you have any queries.
Reminder – Blackboard will be unavailable 7 pm 29 July 2019 up to noon Tuesday 30 July
The Blackboard upgrade will start at 7 pm Monday 29 July 2019. Blackboard will be unavailable up to midday on Tuesday 30 July. We will announce completion of the upgrade through this blog.
Questionmark service downtime commencing Thursday 25th July
Our self-hosted Questionmark online assessment platform is being upgraded to version 6 and migrated to the cloud-based On Demand service. This work is essential as our current version, Perception 5.7, will no longer be supported by the company after July 2019.
Questionmark will be unavailable from 11am on Thursday 25th July 2019 until Monday 5th August 2019. The new upgraded On Demand service is expected to be available from 9am on Monday 5th August 2019.
Further information is available on the Questionmark changes summer 2019 webpage.
Turnitin issue resolved – Users experiencing 404 error when viewing submissions – 24th July
Turnitin had reported they were experiencing issues where users were being presented with a 404 error when viewing submissions.
This has now been resolved.