Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
We have just received the following message from Turnitin:
TurnitinUK is experiencing an intermittent issue that impacts integrations.
We are working to resolve this and will provide updates.
This could affect us, as we use Turnitin through an integration with Blackboard. We will pass on any updates we receive.
There were problems accessing Blackboard over the weekend of 15/16 March. This was due to a partial failure of automatic update scripts. As a result, a number of students and staff were unable to access some courses. The issue was investigated on Sunday and a fix put in place. As a result, all staff and students should now have access to all their courses, and this issue should not arise again.
We apologise for the inconvenience this issue caused to many of our users this weekend.
Turnitin have announced that their services may be intermittently unavailable during a maintenance period on Saturday, March 1, 2014 from 3 pm to 7 pm. Turnitin recommend that instructors modify any assignment due dates to either before or at least several hours after the maintenance window.
We recommend that any Turnitin submissions be postponed until 9 am on Monday, when local support will be available.
IT Services have carried out maintenance work that has resolved the issue with Authoring Manager running on local machines.
Authoring Manager on the terminal server is still running slowly and IT Services are working on resolving this issue.
There have been reports of some issues affecting Turnitin submissions since Turnitin implemented an upgrade on January 23rd. The issues are intermittent and have straightforward workarounds, which are outlined below. Turnitin are aware of these issues and are working to rectify them.
Firstly, some digital receipt emails may not have been sent to submitters. In these cases, although the submission has been completed successfully, the email confirming this has not been delivered. Submitters can check that the submission was successful within Turnitin, and can also download a pdf version of the digital receipt from there.
Secondly, some Turnitin submissions may not be showing in the Grade Centre, even though they were successful and can be seen in the assignment inbox in Turnitin. This workaround for this issue is to edit the Turnitin assignment settings, and then save them without making any changes – this will trigger the data to be resent.
Further information about these issues can be found on the Known Turnitin Service Issues website.
Please accept our apologies if you have been affected by any of these issues.
The work moving QuestionMark Perception to the new SAN has been completed as scheduled, and the system is now available and working normally.
IT Services are reporting that they believe they have resolved the issues affecting the Storage Area Network, which were having knock-on effects on Blackboard and QuestionMark Perception – see their news item here. Please check the IT Services News & Announcements page for future updates.
Issues with the SAN (Storage Area Network) are causing several University systems, including Blackboard, to run slowly. The issues are being investigated by IT Services. We will post updates as we receive them.
Please accept our apologies for any problems this is causing.
QuestionMark Perception is currently unavailable, due to a hardware failure on the server. IT Services are working to resolve the problem, and we will post updates here as we have them.
Many apologies for any difficulties caused by this.
Turnitin have reported that the earlier problems with the service have been fixed, and the system is operating normally now.