Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
We are aware of an issue where some email copies of receipts for work submitted in Blackboard are being significantly delayed in reaching students, who may then be concerned that their submission has not been properly completed.
Students can always access their receipt number by re-opening the submission within the Blackboard course. The receipt number is shown at the top right:
The issue has been raised with Blackboard and we will provide updates here.
At 10.32, Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported that they had started to correct the issue that was affecting services (including Blackboard) this morning. Our own testing shows that our services now appear to be working normally again, although AWS warn that they have a backlog of queued service requests that will take some time to work through.
This issue was resolved, starting at 10.32 on 20 October 2025.
There is currently a global issue with Amazon Web Services, which is causing multiple problems with other cloud-based services, including Blackboard and Turnitin. We are monitoring the situation and are in contact with the service suppliers, and will update this blog when we have further information.
Blackboard is still accessible and operational – the main impact is that you may be unable to access other, connected tools from within Blackboard, such as Turnitin and Re/Play.
When accessing the Gradebook in Blackboard Ultra, you may see a prompt inviting you to “Set up the overall mark”.
You should not set it up as, at Bristol, Blackboard is used to hold ‘raw’ marks – students should be using eVision to see their overall marks. Instead, you should click on “Hide this message” to remove the prompt.
If you have already set up the overall mark, you can hide it from students by going to Gradebook > Settings > Manage Overall Grade and unchecking the option to ‘Show to Students’.
Once your Blackboard course is ready for your students, the final step is to make the course available to them. In Blackboard Ultra, this looks slightly different to how it did in Original. When you are in your course, at the top right of the screen, you will see a “CLOSED” (or “OPEN”) indicator – shown below.
To change this, click on the indicator, which will pull open the ‘Course Settings’ pane. Under ‘Course status’, select “Open” to make the course accessible to students. Then close the ‘Course Settings’ pane by clicking on the purple cross at the top left.
All Blackboard courses for the coming teaching block should be accessible to students at the start of Welcome Week.
In line with the University’s Data Retention policy, we will be deleting all Blackboard unit courses from the academic year 2015-16 (and earlier). These courses are already unavailable to staff and students. The deletion will take place on September 1 – please contact the DEO (digital-education@bristol.ac.uk) before that date if you have any questions or concerns about this process. Once the courses are deleted, their content will no longer be available on our Blackboard system.
The issue with extracting marks from Blackboard to eVision was resolved yesterday, 29 April, at around 5 pm. It was caused by a University-wide issue with Microsoft web applications.
Please accept our apologies for the disruption.
Update: This issue was resolved at around 5 pm on 29 April.
You may be experiencing an issue with extracting marks from Blackboard to SITS/eVision, which we believe is being caused by the current IT Services issue with a range of web-hosted applications (noted under “Exam Timetables Down” on the IT Service Status page). We are investigating this and will provide updates here as we have them. In the meantime, it may be necessary to manually enter any marks that are needed in eVision urgently.
Please accept our apologies for this disruption.
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.
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.