Users of the Blackboard and Blackboard Instructor mobile apps are currently unable to search for their institutions. Users with existing sessions or cached search results are not affected.
The issue started at approximately 16:30 on January 8, 2019. An investigation into the issue is ongoing. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Blackboard will performing infrastructure maintenance between 1 am and 5 am on Friday 25 January. You should therefore expect a service interruption to Blackboard during this maintenance window.
Thank you in advance for your understanding.
Blackboard are performing scheduled maintenance on their data servers on Friday December 28th between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. which will result in a loss of service for this time.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
The “Quick tools” feature (pictured below) will be temporarily unavailable between 1:00 pm on 3 January and 12:00 noon 4 January. This is to allow us to update the tool. No other features of Blackboard are affected.
The “Quick Tools” allow instructors to post announcements to multiple courses and toggle course availability for students. These actions can still be performed within individual courses during this brief update period. See:
This announcement is for staff who use Questionmark. We have been informed by Questionmark that they will no longer provide support for the University’s current version, Perception 5.7, after July 2019. This means that we will need to upgrade our service before 31st July 2019.
Action required:
In order to help us identify a suitable time to upgrade please complete this form to let us know:
any assessments planned between 10th June and 31st July 2019
whether you would like to try out the new version of Questionmark
Deadline: Friday 18th January 2019
Contact for queries: digital-education@bristol.ac.uk
Due to an Education Services festive event, the Digital Education Office will be unavailable on Friday 14th December. Please email Digital-Education as usual and we will respond as soon as possible. If you experience urgent problems during this time (for example, a service is unavailable), please contact the Service Desk on (0117 92) 87870.
Booking is now open for Digital Education Office workshops and webinars in the New Year. These include new webinars covering Blackboard Basics and the Grade Centre, as well as workshops on Blackboard, materials design, synchronous online teaching, and advanced admin skills for EMA. More information and booking.
Recordings of our Winter webinar series are also available. These covered:
To request access to the recordings please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk
You may have experienced issues with viewing Turnitin submissions on Friday 7 December between 3.15 pm and 5.05 pm. This was the result of a service degradation affecting the performance of Feedback Studio. Turnitin have fixed the issue, and apologise for any inconvenience caused.
We are planning a minor update to Blackboard between 9 pm on Sunday 16 December and 9 am on Monday 17 December. We will confirm the maintenance following further testing of the update. If we can proceed with the work, there will be unavailability over this period and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.
The next Digital Education Office winter webinar is “Help your students engage with your Blackboard course” and will take place on Wednesday 5 December from 11.15 – 11.45am. It will include top tips for course design and layout, and a chance to ask questions.