Summer work on Blackboard, Re/Play and Teams for Education – new features and scheduled downtime

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Over the summer we will be working to improve our systems and introduce new features. Blackboard, Re/Play and Teams for Education will all see improvements and new features. Please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk if you have any questions. 

Blackboard 

  • Migration onto cloud servers – this will scale the capacity of the system to meet demand, enable us to receive bug fixes and upgrades more quickly, and eliminate the need for any downtime for future upgrades and fixes. 
  • Improved text editor – key features include: better copy-and-paste, improved editing from mobile devices, improved accessibility, display computer code snippets, easy text wrapping around images. 
  • Reusable comments bank – a new feature will allow individual markers to maintain a bank of reusable comments 

As previously announced, Blackboard will be unavailable from 9pm on Friday 30 July to 9am on Tuesday 3 August while the migration to the cloud server takes place. For further information see our Blackboard developments summer 2021 project page. 

 Re/Play 

  • New manual recording app – in our equipped rooms you will now be able to make full use of in-room camera equipment 
  • Live streaming – a new service for live streaming from our equipped rooms 
  • New Desktop Recorder – we will be introducing a new desktop app called Mosaic 

We have also fixed a security problem relating to embedded content – embedded videos added before 19 July 2021 have been replaced with direct links, and all new embedded content should use the mashup tool. 

For further information see our Re/Play summer improvements page. 

Teams for Education 

Microsoft Teams offers tools for collaboration, discussion, teamwork and community building. These are intended to complement Blackboard. 

  • Optional Teams space for each taught unit – Teams spaces will be created automatically, with students and teaching staff, but will be hidden from students buy default 
  • Simple integration between Blackboard and Teams – for active Teams, direct links will be added between Teams and the appropriate Blackboard courses 

For further information see our Microsoft Teams for teaching project page. 

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