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.
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.
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.
On Saturday 29 March, between 15:00 – 15:30 GMT, Turnitin will be performing maintenance on their system. During this small window of time, Turnitin will be unavailable.
You can stay up to date with the Turnitin system status on the Turnitin status page. We apologise for any inconvenience.
Blackboard is currently investigating an intermittent document rendering issue affecting the Annotate tool. Instructors using Blackboard assignments and attempting to annotate papers via the online interface may be affected.
The supplier is actively working to restore the service to optimal performance, and we are closely monitoring the situation. We will provide updates as we have them.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Please note that, if a Blackboard course has both Blackboard assignments with Turnitin enabled and Turnitin LTI submission points in it, and a student submits similar work to both, the similarity scores for the later submission may be higher, due to it matching the earlier one. This can occur when, for example, a student’s summative submission is based on their previous formative submission. The supplier is aware of this issue and is currently working on a fix.
You can avoid this issue by ensuring that, within one course, you either use Turnitin LTI submission points or Ultra assignments with Turnitin enabled, but not both.
If you have experienced this issue and need assistance updating the similarity reports, please get in contact with us by emailing us at digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Please note that Blackboard Ultra assignments with Turnitin enabled do not have an interface to for managing permanent deletions from Turnitin’s Paper Repository. This means that, currently, every permanent deletion request needs to be referred to Turnitin, and may take several days to process. (This is not the case for standalone Turnitin LTI assignments, where paper deletions can be managed from within the Turnitin interface.)
The same applies to restoring any papers deleted in error – these will also require referral to Turnitin, and require additional time to process.
If you need help on how to deal with paper deletions, please get in contact with us by emailing us at digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.