We are experiencing some problems accessing Turnitin in some of our Blackboard courses following our upgrade yesterday. If you find that you have lost access to the Turnitin tool in your course please follow these steps:
From the Course Management menu click Customisation > Tool Availability and then put a tick next to the Turnitin options in the page of tools that appears > click submit. (please leave Turnitin basic tools unticked)
We have now upgraded Blackboard and changed the visual theme. Find out more about the new theme through our previous blog post. You can find further information, including guides to creating banners to differentiate between courses on our web pages.
Unfortunately we are experiencing a problem with Turnitin at the moment. We are working with our suppliers to remedy this as soon as possible and will update this blog with any further information.
One or two courses with customised themes may need to be changed. Please see the information on this page
It services are planning some maintenance work on Friday 9th June from 7 – 8 am which may affect the provision of Blackboard. Whilst we anticipate the service will still be available there is a chance that it will become inaccessible during this time. We apologise for any inconvenience caused and will update this blog with any further information.
External Hosting
We are delighted to announce that Blackboard will be moved to an externally-hosted service this summer. Benefits of external hosting of technical support include:
The move to external hosting will take place between 4:30 pm on Friday 21 July and 4:00 pm on Tuesday 25 July. A read-only Blackboard service will be available over that period. All existing data and courses will be migrated to the externally-hosted service.
Software upgrade, course rollover
New online teaching tool – Blackboard Collaborate
Please refer to our external hosting project web page for updated information, where we will add answers to frequently asked questions.
For Blackboard support, training and advice, please contact us: (tel-help@bristol.ac.uk; 0117 33 17605).
There are currently problems with the Peermark service meaning assignments cannot be created. The service provider are aware of this error and are working towards a solution, hopefully within the next couple of days.
We will keep the blog updated with any news.
Apologies for any inconvenience
The Turnitin service has now been restored, apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Turnitin and TurnitinUK are currently experiencing a service disruption which means that the service is unavailable for use. We will update this blog with any further information about the downtime and sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
We have been notified that the TurnitIn service has now returned to normal. We would like to apologise for any inconvenience that the temporary degradation in service may have caused.
TEL and Ed Dev
We have received some system status reports from our software provider TurnitIn that they are currently experiencing some degradation to the service. Please be aware that the system may be slower than usual if you are trying to access it. We will keep this blog updated with any further information
TEL and Ed Dev Team
Following the recent incidents affecting the availability of Blackboard and other University services, IT Services have identified some essential maintenance work which will improve the resilience of these services, reducing both the likelihood and the impact of any incidents in the future. In order to undertake this essential and urgent work, we are planning to make Blackboard unavailable from 7 am on Friday 24 February; it should be available again by 2 pm that afternoon.
We are, of course, aware that any significant period of Blackboard downtime will be disruptive, and are doing our best to minimise the impact. If you have any concerns or questions about this work, please get in touch with us at tel-help@bristol.ac.uk, and please accept our apologies for the inevitable inconvenience it will cause.