IT Services need to carry out some emergency maintenance work on Blackboard in order to ensure service continuity. We are aware of the importance of the service during the revision period, and IT Services have agreed to perform the maintenance at 7:00 am on Friday morning (13 January) in order to minimise impact. The service should return by 7:30 am. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
Author Archives: Tel Team
Turnitin Unavailable Saturday January 7th, 3pm – 11pm
Turnitin have announced on Saturday Saturday January 7th, the following services will be unavailable from 3pm – 11pm GMT due to necessary scheduled maintenance:
• Turnitin (including mobile)
• TurnitinUK
• iThenticate
• WriteCheck
• Integrations
Where applicable, please be aware no submissions or grading will be possible through any of the services listed above during this time. We therefore advise that submission deadlines be set outside of this maintenance window.
Academic Registry end of year celebration – Wed December 14th 2016
Due to an Academic Registry Christmas event, the TEL and Ed Dev teams will be unavailable on the afternoon of Wed 14th December. Please email TEL-Help 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.
Problems uploading to Turnitin – Friday 18 November
Turnitin have reported that students are currently encountering issues when submitting papers after the due date. Turnitin are working to resolve this error and we will blog any further updates. There is more information on the Turnitin system status page.
TEL Team
Phishing emails purporting to be from Blackboard
Some users have reported receiving the following emails from the “Blackboard Learn system”:
Blackboard Learn™
Bristol Courses System Update.
You have received a new update from Blackboard Learn system about your new
course form-871.
Please view this update and fill the process form Urgent.
These are not genuine. Please do not respond, and refer to IT Services guidance on phishing emails.
Phishing emails purporting to be from Blackboard
Some users have reported receiving the following emails from the “Blackboard Learn system”:
Blackboard Learn™
Bristol Courses System Update.
You have received a new update from Blackboard Learn system about your new
course form-871.
Please view this update and fill the process form Urgent.
These are not genuine. Please do not respond, and refer to IT Services guidance on phishing emails.
Intermittent announcement problems in Blackboard
We are experiencing intermittent problems sending out announcements from Blackboard courses. We have raised the issue with Blackboard and they are currently investigating, we will update this blog with any further progress. Please check that your announcements have been sent, and don’t rely solely on this method of communication for urgent subjects until a satisfactory resolution has been reached with our suppliers.
Apologies for any inconvenience, we are working to rectify this as soon as possible.
Blackboard mobile app problems
We are currently experiencing some problems with the Blackboard mobile app not loading new pages. The message from Blackboard is: Users will not be able to look up their school from their mobile apps, however any cached sessions will continue to work. Blackboard Engineers are investigating.
We will update this blog with any further details.
Tips to improve your course design in Blackboard
We’ve put together a series of very short (~1 minute) videos with some of our top tips for Blackboard course design:
http://digitaleducation.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/category/top-tips/
Topics include: improving your menu, decluttering your course, and previewing as a student.
More to come over the next few days.
Make Blackboard courses available to students
As an Instructor, if under “My Courses” on your Blackboard home page you see “not currently available” or “unavailable” after the course name, this means the course is unavailable to students. Instructors can still access and edit the course.
Once your course is ready for students to use, ensure that it is made available as follows:
- Click on the course
- Under Control Panel, click on Customisation
- Click on Properties
- In section 3, Set availability, select Yes
- Click Submit
Your course is now available to students.
You can also use the Qwickly tool on your Blackboard Home page (this does not currently work for Hub courses). Click Course Availability and turn the On/Off button next to the course to the required state.