Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
The supplier has notified us that the ‘Submit on behalf of’ functionality in Turnitin’s assignment inbox has been restored.
The incident occurred between 11 April and 17 April. The impact of the issue was limited, and most Turnitin users were unaffected.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused. If you have any questions, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Turnitin has informed us that the issue causing a delay in Similarity Report generation has now been resolved.
Starting at 9.30 AM today, an unexpected service incident occurred in Turnitin causing a delay in the generation of Similarity Reports. The impact of this issue was limited, and most Turnitin users were unaffected. Students were still able to submit work, although they may have experienced a delay in receiving their report.
If you have any questions or concerns about this issue, or if you believe you have been affected, please get in touch by emailing digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Turnitin is currently experiencing an unexpected service incident, which may result in delays in the generation of Similarity Reports. Students are still able to submit work, but they may experience a delay in receiving their report.
The supplier is aware of the issue and is working to restore full functionality to Turnitin.
If you have any concerns or questions, please contact us by emailing digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
We are aware of an issue affecting the display of the ‘Submit on behalf of’ functionality in Turnitin’s assignment inbox. The issue has been reported to Turnitin Support Engineers, who are currently investigating.
In the meantime, if you need to upload a paper on behalf of a student, there is a workaround available for non-anonymous assignments: selecting the three dots in the Options column for the student and clicking Upload.
For further details, please refer to the guide to Submitting on behalf of a student.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.
The annual creation of Blackboard unit courses has been carried out, and the 2025/26 Blackboard courses are available to access. We are now working on building “parent” courses, where these are needed.
This year, all courses are Ultra courses, using the new Ultra templates created with the faculties. You can find your courses in the usual way, by logging in to Blackboard.
Instructor enrolments are copied from the previous year’s courses, where these exist; instructors will need to be manually enrolled onto all new courses. Please contact your school office if you need to be added to any new Blackboard courses.
Information on training and support for Blackboard Ultra is available on the Blackboard Ultra move project site.
Please note that, because of the early creation of courses, some tools that link to other University services outside Blackboard – such as Re/Play and Talis Aspire Resource Lists – will not be fully functional until those services have carried out their annual switch-over. For Re/Play, links to Collections won’t work until mid-July. For resource lists, links can be added to your 2025-26 lists from Thursday 29 May; please contact lib-resource-lists@bristol.ac.uk or your Subject Librarian if you require any support with this.
If you have any other questions or concerns, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
We’re pleased to confirm that the following issue has been resolved:
Mis-classification of some Blackboard Ultra assessment columns
Please note: ULTRA calculated columns created via the SITS/eVision integration in the past couple of weeks may still display the same issue. You could do either of the following:
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
If you have any further questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk
Blackboard is continuing to investigate an intermittent issue with document rendering in the Annotate tool, which is affecting users globally.
When this happens, students submitting assignments with attachments might see an error message asking them to try again later. Please note that this does not stop the submission, but it can be confusing as students cannot view the document’s content during the upload process. However, students can confirm that their submission has been successful by looking at their digital receipt.
Blackboard developers are collaborating with their partners to fix it, and a solution will be included in a future update.
If you have any questions or encounter this issue and need support, please email us at digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 18 April 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
Ahead of the assessment period, we would like to remind you of two issues that may interfere with student access to their Turnitin submission points:
We recommend that instructors and administrators edit their Turnitin assignments to open in the same window as the Blackboard page, as opening in a new window may be treated as a “pop-up” window and blocked by some browsers. To do this:
We are aware that people are sometimes seeing the error message ‘Invalid or missing state’ when trying to access Turnitin. This issue has been reported to Turnitin and is linked to the privacy settings of the users’ internet browser.
Please make the following information available to students and staff in your school, to assist them if they encounter this error.
If using Safari, we recommend that users try accessing Turnitin via Chrome or Microsoft Edge in the first instance, as Blackboard and Turnitin submissions have been successfully tested with these University-supported browsers.
If switching browsers is not a suitable solution for you, we recommend updating your browser’s security settings to enable JavaScript and third-party cookies specifically for accessing Turnitin submission points.
The ‘Invalid or missing state’ message comes up when launching a Turnitin assignment in a new browser window with third-party cookies and/or JavaScript blocked. This issue can be resolved by adjusting the browser’s Privacy & Security preferences by adding “api.turnitin.com” and “api.turnitinuk.com” to the sites that are allowed to use JavaScript / third-party cookies. This change will ensure that Turnitin’s required background scripts are not blocked.
Once you have completed reviewing your browser’s Privacy & Security preferences, please close your active browser and re-open a new browsing session so that any changes can take effect.
If you experience any problems, please contact the DEO via digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
This issue is now resolved, please see updated blog post:
We’ve received reports that some Blackboard Ultra assessments created via the integration with SITS/eVision – specifically, the BBOther or Turnitin submission types, which use calculated columns – are being labelled in the Gradebook as ‘Non-markable items’.
This does not affect the functionality – marks can still be mapped and extracted by the normal method. However, it may cause confusion in the marks view, where these columns show as ‘Non-markable items.’
Anthology is currently investigating the issue. We apologise for any inconvenience and will provide updates as soon as we have more information.