Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
Turnitin have announced that their services will be mostly unavailable during a scheduled maintenance period on Saturday, 15 August 2015, from 15.00 to 19.00.
An announcement will appear to users within Turnitin in advance of when the system will be unavailable for the scheduled maintenance.
Due to database maintenance, Blackboard will be unavailable between 8am and midday on Wednesday 8th July, as announced in IT Services News.
IT Services apologises for any inconvenience this may cause. Please contact the IT Service Desk if you need further information.
QuestionMark Perception is available again. IT Services are still investigating the underlying issue. Therefore, QMP should be regarded as “at risk”, and the service not relied upon. We will post a further update when this situation changes.
Please contact tel-help@bristol.ac.uk if you have any concerns or questions.
As reported by IT Services recently, changes to the Chrome web browser that are due to start in April will stop Java plugins from working. Almost all the functionality of Blackboard will be unaffected by these changes. However, the drag-and-drop multiple file upload system for Course Files and the Content Collection uses the Java plugin, and may stop working when these changes come into effect. You will still be able to upload files one at a time in Chrome, and the multiple file upload system will still work in Internet Explorer, so please use whichever of these approaches best suits you. In addition, the Campus Pack Podcast tools use Java, and so you might need to use Internet Explorer to access these.
To ensure that we are providing the best possible service to our users, our colleagues in IT Services need to undertake some maintenance work on Blackboard.
Blackboard will not be available to users between noon and 5 pm on Wednesday the 28th January to allow this work to be completed.
If you have any questions, or critical activity (eg submission deadlines or tests requiring Blackboard) scheduled during this time, please email tel-help@bristol.ac.uk.
To help us schedule this type of work, we use the “critical dates” information provided by our users. If you have not done so already, please forward to the email address above the following information about critical activities you are running using Blackboard or Questionmark Perception:
IT Services have informed us that they are intending to take down the server that hosts Blackboard (and other services, such as SITS) on Thursday evening for two hours, between 5.30 pm and 7.30 pm. This is to allow them to make important repairs to the hardware. Hopefully this downtime will not have a significant impact, but please contact us if you think it is going to cause any problems for you or your students. We will pass on updates as we receive them.
The Questionmark Perception system will be unavailable on Wednesday 24th September 2014. The downtime is required for maintenance.
Thursday 25th will be an “at risk” period – we strongly recommend that you do not run any critical activities on this day. Please let us know (tel-help@bristol.ac.uk) if you have any critical activity that must run on this day.
The Questionmark Perception upgrade has been successfully completed and the service has now been resumed.
Upcoming examinations. We would recommend staff to check that their questions and assessments are working as expected before making exams available to students.
Upgrade of your local installation of Authoring Manager. Your local installation of the Authoring Manager will need to be upgraded to version 5.7. We are working with IT Services to arrange this to be done automatically. In the meantime, please use the Terminal Server. Instructions on how to access the Terminal Server can be found on the Authoring Manager Installation page.
If you need further help with this please email tel-help@bristol.ac.uk
The QuestionMark perception upgrade has been completed as planned, and the service will be made available to users again on the morning of Monday 18 August.
Turnitin have sent us the following update:
Some users may have experienced some problems with TurnitinUK between 15:01 and 16:25 AM BST. System is normal now.
Please accept our apologies for any disruption this caused.