Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
Collaborate is currently experiencing an unexpected partial service disruption. During this time, you may experience an error when joining a Collaborate session. Blackboard Collaborate is investigating.
We apologise for the disruption and will provide an update when we hear anything further.
Please check the IT service status page to see how the University’s systems and services are working and for planned maintenance information. You can also check the Blackboard status page.
Blackboard has advised us that there will be scheduled maintenance taking place on Friday, November 6, between 1 am and 7 am. The purpose of the maintenance is to upgrade firmware on their datacentre’s cluster switches.
No impact is expected during this time; however, Blackboard is classing this maintenance as potentially service-impacting.
During the maintenance, you can check Blackboard’s service status page.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused. If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Please check the IT service status page to see how the University’s systems and services are working and for planned maintenance information.
Blackboard Collaborate has advised us that there will be scheduled maintenance taking place on Friday, November 6, between midnight and 4 am. The purpose of the maintenance is to provide critical improvement to Collaborate’s stability and performance.
During this time, users will experience intermittent availability. We strongly recommend avoiding using Collaborate throughout this maintenance window, due to the database maintenance being performed, even if the tool is available.
During the maintenance, you can check Blackboard’s service status page.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused. If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Please check the IT service status page to see how the University’s systems and services are working and for planned maintenance information.
The issues that led to some people having difficulty accessing Blackboard, from around 12.15 today, have now been fixed. We are continuing to monitor the situation.
Please accept our apologies if you were affected by this issue.
<< update 15/10/20: 13.05 – this issue is now resolved>>
Some people may be having difficulty accessing Blackboard currently due to external network routing issues. The issues appear to be impacting Blackboard users worldwide. We are investigating, and will provide updates when we have them.
We are pleased to announce that the “My Re/Play” tab has been restored in Blackboard. All our services (including Re/Play, Blackboard and Collaborate) are available and working normally. We are continuing to closely monitor these services, along with our suppliers. Please accept our apologies for the issues that you experienced yesterday. Further information about the nature of the issues and the steps taken to resolve them will follow shortly.
At the moment, the “My Re/Play” tab is unavailable in Blackboard, due to the issue that affected it earlier today. We are working to resolve this issue, and hope to make the “My Re/Play” tab available again in the near future. While it is unavailable, staff who need to access their recordings, or make them available to students, can use the following workaround.
To create a link that students can use to view one of your recordings:
You may recently have been experiencing difficulty in accessing Blackboard, or finding it running slowly. Blackboard are aware of this issue, and are taking steps to rectify it. This work should be completed very soon.
Collaborate sessions should not have been affected by this.
We will update you with further information when we have it.
Blackboard will be performing infrastructure maintenance on Saturday 3rd October between 1 am and 5 am. During this maintenance window, Blackboard may be unavailable for a period of up to 20 minutes. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.
The annual “rollover” of Blackboard courses into their 2020 versions is now complete, and staff can access the courses. As always, staff are not automatically added to courses for units that are new this year – please contact your school office to be added to a new course.
This year, many schools have adopted a new Blackboard course template, in preparation for blended teaching and learning in 2020-21. Guidance on how to make use of these templates can be found in the Blackboard courses themselves – there is a “Help for staff” area in each course created from a template. If you have any questions about the adoption of these templates, please consult your school in the first instance.