Author Archives: Suzanne Collins

Service Improvements from the DEO

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Each year, the Digital Education Office delivers a plan of work on our digital education environments and systems. This plan includes any significant system changes or software upgrades, but also includes more minor changes to systems and processes, ensuring everything works well for the next academic year.

We have updated the Service Improvements page, documenting and advertising completed work and letting you know what to expect in terms of improvements before the start of term. Any major changes will also have been announced via other channels, such as this blog and the staff bulletins.

Student Developers to work on Ultra wave 1

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The DEO has recently recruited and trained a team of Student Developers (SDs) to support the move to Blackboard Ultra. Our SDs are an important part of how we will support this move.  

The overall objectives for the SDs are to: 

  1. offer hands-on help to staff moving to Ultra 
  2. review courses, content and workflows to identify ways to improve the student experience 
  3. identify and develop Ultra support materials for students 
  4. realise opportunities to strengthen their digital skills.  

In wave 1, SDs will be working with faculties and the project to establish how best to use SDs in the major move to Ultra planned for academic year 25/26.  

Allocation and management 

Each of the six old faculties will be allocated two dedicated student developers, with two back-up developers who can be drawn on if demand or skills require it.

Each student developer can work up to 15 hours per week. 

For wave 1, the project will trial two management approaches for SDs: 

  1. Allocation: in Health Sciences and Arts, dedicated student developers will be allocated to embedded digital education leads, who will determine which units the students work with. 
  1. Central management: In Engineering, Life Sciences, Social Sciences, and Science, student developers will be managed by the Ultra project.

Allocation of back-up student developers will be managed by the project. 

Key activities of Student Developers 

SDs will be able to: 

  • Move content such as documents, videos, MCQs 
  • Resolve common issues when moving content 
  • Run Ally reports and make changes to materials to make them more accessible 
  • Review Ultra courses from a student’s eye view for good design, usability and accessibility. 

They will also be asked to: 

  • Keep a log of actions they have been asked to perform to enable quality assurance and create a change management audit trail in the event of any issues 
  • Provide peer support for other SDs to offer advice and guidance on good approaches. 

Roles and responsibilities 

The Ultra project will:

  • Recruit SDs, collate activity and process payslips 
  • Provide training and support, including back-up support from other SDs, the project and the DEO  
  • Troubleshoot any issues collaboratively with faculty, school and unit staff 
  • Manage allocation in faculties that are not self-managing. 

Faculties and schools will:

  • Identify units and areas for SD activity 
  • Ensure tasks fit within the SD role 
  • Flag tasks which do not fit in the SD role to the project 
  • Quality assure all actions of the SD to ensure that the work is completed to a good standard before it is released to students 
  • Report issues to the project team. 

More information 

The project will take steps to ensure that SDs are providing good, useful support but it is important that faculty staff check work undertaken by the SDs as part of their review/refresh of unit and programme courses before they are released to students. 

It’s anticipated that faculty staff will engage in a dialogue with their SDs, to fine-tune the support offered. Any major suggestions, issues or concerns should be raised with the project in the first instance and not with the SD. 

DEO faculty liaison roles to support the move to Ultra

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To support faculties moving to Blackboard Ultra for the 2024/25 Academic Year, the DEO and the Ultra project are establishing dedicated faculty liaison roles. The aim of these roles is to be a named contact in the DEO for Ultra wave 1 participants – someone who can direct staff to the support they need and ensure the project better understands faculty and school needs and any blockers or barriers. The role will advise on customisation of central training and guidance to better fit with local needs, encourage the dissemination of good practice, and provide guidance to Ultra student developers. 

Faculties involved in wave 1 will be receiving more information on their faculty liaison shortly. For all general project enquiries, please contact blackboard-ultra@bristol.ac.uk.

Changes to Blackboard Submission Receipts will not be Implemented

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In a prior blog post, we announced that Blackboard was deprecating support for the Receipting Building Block, which we use to customise the receipts students receive when submitting work to a Blackboard Assignment. This would have resulted in changes to the email receipt that students receive after submission.

Following further discussions with Blackboard, we are pleased to announce that these changes will no longer be implemented, meaning that: 

  • Students: will continue to receive a detailed email receipt including a link that they can use to download a copy of their submitted document(s).  
  • Administration Staff:  will continue to be able to review submission receipts stored for within the content system of a given course. 

The default wording on student receipts will continue to be: 

Your submission has been received. We have recorded the following details: 

Submission ID: ID NUMBER 

User: STUDENT NAME 

Student ID: STUDENT NUMBER 

Assignment: NAME OF SUBMITTED DOCUMENT(S) 

Course: NAME OF COURSE 

Date of Submission: SUBMISSION DATE AND TIME 

This submission contained the following attached files: 

LINK TO FILES AND SIZE OF FILES 

Please retain this email receipt. Do not reply to this email. If you have any queries about your submission, please contact your school. 

 

 

Re/Play updates and improvements

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Re/PlayAs part of the ongoing work reviewing and improving the Re/Play service, the DEO has upgraded Re/Play over the summer to the newer, more robust LTI 1.3 version. The core service of automatic lecture capture will still work in the same way and there are many improvements, but there are some changes that may affect existing videos and your future work. 

The key changes are: 

  • Streamlined and improved workflows to add Re/Play content directly within Blackboard: You should ensure you are familiar with these workflows for adding content to Blackboard. 
  • Improved integration of permissions using Blackboard roles: Provided you follow the revised workflows, this will ensure your students get the best experience as it uses their Blackboard roles to grant the correct access to Re/Play content. In addition, it enables all instructors on a course to find and edit a unit’s recordings. 
  • Improved search functionality, allowing for filtering of search results: You should familiarise yourself with these changed filters as you may need to adjust them to find what you are looking for. 
  • Older content may need review: 
    • Make sure any older content added to Blackboard is working as expected, and re-add anything that isn’t playing for you. This is relevant for rolled over content which was added prior to June 2022.  
    • If you used the now out-of-support ‘iframe embed’ workflow (adding recordings using the html editor), replace those with the new ‘embedded player’ option wherever possible. 

We have updated our Re/Play guidance – Re/Play videos: upload, enhance, share – to include more details on all of the above.

We recommend you bookmark this link to refer to as you get used to the changes. 

In addition, we have responded to the feedback and consultations we have had with staff and students in the Digital Learning Environment review focus on Re/Play and have made some further improvements to the lecture capture experience.   

  • Lectures will now be recorded by default in the higher framerate, meaning that they will capture handwriting or animations smoothly without the need to request a ‘screencast’ in advance 
  • Recordings will be made available to students after 24 rather than 48 hours 

Where to get more help and training 

You can find all of the guidance for getting the best from Re/Play via the DEO’s Re/Play webpages. Re/Play | Digital Education Office | University of Bristol  

There are also a number of Re/Play related workshops and training sessions planned for the start of term. 

DEO have new Re/Play training which you can find and book via Develop. https://develop.bristol.ac.uk/ilp/pages/description.jsf?menuId=1108#/users/@self/catalogues/1464674/coursetemplates/3160151/description  

IT Services have user guides and run sessions on the audio visual equipment in rooms. 

  

 

Mentimeter – do not use ‘Shared Presentations’

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In Mentimeter, a ‘Shared Presentations’ feature has appeared on the left-hand side toolbar as part of a recent update, as well as an option on the menu in each presentation called ‘Move to Shared Presentations’. We are advising you not to use this feature, as it shares both the presentation and results with everyone within the University. We are aware that this is not suitable for University use and are therefore discussing disabling this feature with the software provider. 

If you have already moved your presentation to this new area, it’s very easy to move back:  

  • Go to Share Presentations 
  • Select the three dots on the right-hand side 
  • Select ‘Move to My Presentations’ 

If you would like to share your presentation to collaborate with another member of staff, you can do this in the way you are used to, from the ‘My Presentations’ section:  

  • Select the three dots next to the presentation you want to share
  • Select ‘Invite Collaborators’, and type the email address of the user you wish to share with 
  • Select ‘Invite Users’ 

Or 

  • Select the three dots next to the presentation you want to share 
  • Select ‘Share’ and then ‘Invite Collaborators’ 
  • Type the email address of the user you wish to share with 
  • Select ‘Invite Users’ 

Please note that Groups are only for sharing templates. 

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

Summer digital education improvements

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Each year, the Digital Education Office delivers a summer plan of work on our digital education environments and systems. This plan includes any significant system changes or software upgrades, but also includes more minor changes to systems and processes, ensuring everything works well for the next academic year.  

We regularly update the Service Improvements Page over the summer, documenting and advertising expected and completed work. If you are interested in keeping up to date, it is worth bookmarking this page. Any major changes will also be announced via other channels, such as this blog. 

This year, many of these improvements have been prompted by outputs from the ongoing Digital Learning Environment (DLE) Review. Staff, students and professional services colleagues have been asked to share their experiences of using the digital education environment, as well as work with us to imagine the teaching and learning of the future. To find out more about the DLE review, please visit the DLE SharePoint page for staff. 

 

Teaching staff – complete the Digital Experience Insights survey

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If you teach as part of your role at the University, we need to hear from you!

This year, we are participating in the digital experience insights survey for Higher Education teaching staff, created by Jisc to better understand the way that digital tools and practices are used across the UK HE Sector. Jisc is the UK digital, data and technology agency focused on tertiary education, research and innovation. Some of the questions will feed into a national benchmarking exercise run by Jisc; the results of previous surveys can be found from their webpages.

The Digital Education Office, alongside the Digital Learning Environment Review project team, will also be using the survey results to add important data to our review work, as well as identify those areas which are the highest priority for you.

The survey shouldn’t take longer than 10-15 minutes to complete, and is anonymous.

The survey will close on the 15th June.

Start the survey by following this link. 

 

Jisc Digital Experience Teaching Staff Insights Survey. Complete the survey. Make sure your views are counted. Image of a teacher with two students in a library setting.

 

[Closed] Re/Play timeout error message

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This issue is now resolved. See the updated blog post for the latest information. 

We are aware of reports of a timeout error message when trying to access Re/Play from a Blackboard course menu link (eg to the unit collection of recordings). The supplier has identified the issue is related to search based functions, and is working to resolve it as soon as possible. Recordings added or shared by other methods (eg added via the build content tools in Blackboard) are currently unaffected.

We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.