Author: Tel Team

TEL Systems Downtime – Blackboard (16th January) and QMP (17th January)

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The ongoing problems with the Storage Area Network (SAN) are still adversely affecting the performance of both Blackboard and QuestionMark Perception (QMP). In order to permanently resolve these issues Information Services will be undertaking urgent work requiring downtime on Thursday 16th and Friday 17th January. More information on these issues can be located on the IT Services news page.

Blackboard will be unavailable tomorrow (Thursday 16th January) between 06:00 and 10:00am.
QMP will be unavailable on  Friday morning (17th January) between 06:00 and 10:00am.

 

Apologies in advance for any inconvenience this will cause you or your students.

If you have any questions or concerns please email Hilary Griffiths, Deputy Director Technology Enhanced Learning.

Hilary.Griffiths@Bristol.ac.uk

Extension – 14431

 

Blackboard unavailable – 16th January 6 – 10am

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On Thursday 16th January Blackboard will not be available to users between 6 and 10am. During this time our colleagues in Information Services will be undertaking vital work on the storage systems that underpin Blackboard, see:

http://www.bris.ac.uk/it-services/news/2014/san13jan.html

This date was partly selected based on the critical dates information provided by our faculty colleagues. If you have not informed us of your key or critical dates,  eg submission deadline or online exam, please email us.

If you have any questions please email TEL-Help@bristol.ac.uk or contact Hilary.Griffiths@Bristol.ac.uk.

Please accept our apologies for any disruption caused by the work today.

 

Service problems with Turnitin – 10th December

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There are currently problems with the Turnitin UK service and some users may be receiving error messages and having trouble completing submission.

Turnitin have confirmed they are aware of the problem and are working on it.

If you have students submitting directly to Turnitin, please ask them to try again later. You may also want to consider extending the deadlines for submissions due today.

We will keep you informed, as we receive information from Turnitin, via this blog.

If you have any questions, please email TEL-Help@bristol.ac.uk

Turnitin scheduled maintenance on Saturday December 21st 3 -7pm

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The Turnitin service may be intermittently unavailable during a scheduled
maintenance period on Saturday, December 21st, 2013, from 3 – 7pm
An announcement will appear for users within Turnitin in advance of when
the system will be unavailable for this scheduled maintenance.

Instructors are encouraged to modify assignment due dates either before or
at least several hours after the scheduled maintenance window.

Blackboard unavailable – Tuesday 10th December 5 – 8pm

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On Tuesday the 10th December our colleagues in Information services will be undertaking work that will affect Blackboard. This work is scheduled to take place between 5pm and 8pm and during this time the Blackboard service will not be available for users.

More information about this work can be found on the Information Services web site here

If you have any questions please contact the main service desk service-desk@bristol.ac.uk

 

How to add your Blackboard calendar to Google calendar

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You can add your Blackboard calendar to Google as follows:

  1. Click on your name in the top right of Blackboard
  2. Click on the calendar icon
  3. In the bottom left of the Calendar you will see a link called “Get External calendar link”. Click on this
  4. Copy the link (Ctrl + C  or Cmd + C for Mac)
  5. Open your Google calendar
  6. Under “Other calendars” on the left click the drop down arrow
  7. Choose “Add by URL” and paste in the link (Ctrl + V or Cmd + V for Mac), then click “Add Calendar”
  8. Please note the calendar name may appear initially as a long URL (web address) , but this will then change to University of Bristol.
  9. You may wish to change the Calendar name “University of Bristol” e.g. to Blackboard . To do this click the dropdown to the right of the calendar and select Calendar settings, then edit the name and Save.

Please note that any editing of events has to be done in Blackboard.

Blackboard Notifications – update 8th October

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The testing we have been undertaking to ensure the collection and distribution of Notifications and Updates in Blackboard can run without affecting overall performance is nearly complete.

We are happy that the solution we have in place will allow these to work as expected. To test this we will be switching the distribution back on overnight tonight – please note that to start off with you will receive a larger than normal number while the system catches up.

If you have any questions please email TEL-Help@bristol.ac.uk