Author Archives: Hanrahan Highland

System update for Qwickly Attendance and Course Tools, 29 June

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We will be receiving an essential system update for the Qwickly Attendance and Qwickly Course Tools in Blackboard on Wednesday 29 June. The update will improve accessibility and replace the main navigation menu with a new left-hand menu to make the system easier for instructors to use. The Qwickly settings have also been reconfigured to further simplify use. Details of the changes can be found on our Service Improvements page. Qwickly will remain available to staff throughout the update.

Campus Pack in Blackboard frozen from 24 June

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The Campus Pack features in Blackboard will become unavailable from 24 June, because the tool is no longer being supported by the supplier. Once Campus Pack is unavailable it will not be possible to add new Campus Pack items into courses; Blackboard’s own blogs and wikis can still be used, of course.

If you have a Blackboard course or organisation that already contains Campus Pack features, you will still be able to access these as you can at present. Students will also be able to access them to view old posts unless you choose to make Campus Pack unavailable in your course.

From the summer of 2023, the deprecation of Blackboard building blocks will mean that Campus Pack features will not be accessible at all. If you want to download your own copies of Campus Pack items over the coming year, please follow the directions in our ‘Saving content from Campus Pack‘ guide.

Details of these changes, and the rest of the DEO summer work, can be found on our Service Improvements page.

[Resolved] No access to Re/Play materials added via the “Build Content” menu option

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We are pleased to announce that the issue preventing Re/Play materials being uploaded to Blackboard using “Build Content” has been resolved. This means that all Re/Play material impacted by the incident on Monday 7 February is now accessible to students.

Please accept our apologies for any difficulty this issue has caused you.

If you encounter any further issues, please contact the IT Service Desk or email the Digital Education Office.

Teams for teaching survey – closing date 4 Feb, noon

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If you have used Microsoft Teams for teaching, or might consider using it in the future, we would be grateful if you could take this survey. It should take less than five minutes. The feedback will inform future development and support for Teams for teaching.

Please also pass the link to colleagues who you think may be interested.

Take the survey or find out more about Teams for teaching.

Blackboard marks transfer maintenance, 17 Nov, 10 am – 11 am

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IT Services are making some technical changes to the systems that handle student marks. As a result of this, the ability to transfer marks from Blackboard to SITS/eVision will be unavailable on Wednesday 17 November between 10 am and 11 am. 17 November should be considered an “at risk” day, and we recommend that you do not transfer any marks on this day. If you were planning on transferring marks out of Blackboard on 17 November, or shortly afterwards, please let the Digital Education Office know by emailing digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Sky online access issue

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We have become aware of a nationwide issue this morning for customers of Sky and Now TV which has affected their online access to University services, including Blackboard. It appears that Sky has now fixed the issue, but if staff or students continue to experience problems, they can contact the IT Service Desk for support on 0117 428 2100. As a reminder, if students experience any technical issue with assessments, they should contact the Blended Learning Team on 0117 374 2833.

Issue affecting some videos in Blackboard

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We have been made aware of an issue whereby some videos embedded in Blackboard will not play. This issue only affects a particular type of video – those embedded directly into Blackboard using an older, deprecated method – and doesn’t affect videos that are hosted in Re/Play. We are updating the broken videos we know of with a working link, and are also working with Blackboard on addressing the root cause of the issue.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.

Blackboard courses for the new academic year (2021-22)

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Shortly after the University’s central systems switch over to the new academic year, on August 1, new Blackboard courses will be created for the 2021-22 taught units. These will generally be a copy of the previous year’s course, where that exists, with the summative assessments and Grade Centres cleared ready for the coming year’s assessments. The copies will include the course template structures that were adopted last year by most schools, but the content will need refreshing and resetting for the new academic year. In particular, staff should make sure to remove any of the exam “packages” that were added for the summer assessment period, to avoid confusion.

Students across the University really liked the structure, clarity and consistency provided by the Blackboard course templates, and said how much these helped them with their studying. Carrying this structure forwards, with refreshed content, will help to continue this enhanced student experience of learning.

If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.