Category Archives: Blackboard

SafeAssign Maintenance 31 July

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On Wednesday 31 July, between 09:00 – 11:00 BST, SafeAssign will undergo a maintenance update.

Learn clients will experience impacts for up to seven hours. All submissions during this time will be queued and will be processed at the end of the maintenance period.

This downtime is essential for a backend infrastructure update, as Blackboard is transitioning to a new infrastructure.

If you have any questions about this update, please refer to the Blackboard status page or email us at digital.education@bristol.ac.uk.

Resource List link – updated

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The Resource List tool has temporarily been made active again by Anthology (Blackboard) and all existing links should now be working. It is still advised that you replace these links with the new Talis Aspire Reading List link, as the old tool will not be available in future years. 

Due to the deprecation of the Resource List tool by Anthology (Blackboard), you will need to replace the old links with the new Talis Aspire Reading Lists tool to access the reading lists from within your courses.

To replace a link in the left-hand menu in an Original course, click the ‘plus’ symbol at the top of the menu and choose ‘Tool Link’. “Talis Aspire Reading Lists” will appear within the drop-down menu. Once created, click the link to set up your reading list (you may be asked to authenticate the tool on first use); you will then see your reading lists and you will be able to add the required list to your course.

Talis Aspire left hand menu

You can also add a link within the content area of your course via the ‘Build Content’ drop-down menu.

Talis Aspire build content menu

If you are using an Ultra course, you can find the Talis Aspire Reading Lists link under ‘Course Tools’.

Talis Aspire Ultra Course Tools

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

[Open] Turnitin issues with Firefox and Safari

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We have been made aware that some instructors and students are seeing the error message ‘invalid or missing state’ when trying to access Turnitin when using Safari or Firefox. We are currently investigating the issue with Turnitin; in the meantime, please use Chrome or Edge, as these browsers do not appear to be affected. 

We apologise for any inconvenience.

[RESOLVED] Advisory message about Blackboard email services outage: check emails sent last night.

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We were informed of a temporary outage of Blackboard email services after close of business yesterday (08 May 2024). This issue affected all Blackboard email services globally, including any Blackboard notifications that were also sent as emails and the production of submission receipts.

Whilst the service has now been restored, we advise you to check and resend any Blackboard emails you attempted to send yesterday.

[Resolved] Issue with Blackboard receipts

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Blackboard has successfully resolved the issue with their receipting tool. Consequently, students submitting work to a Blackboard Assignment should now receive a confirmation email containing the details of the submitted work and a link to the document.

Please note that the issue only impacted student submissions to Blackboard Assignments on Tuesday, 7 May. Nevertheless, all receipts were securely stored in Blackboard, and students were able to access their submission records by navigating to the Submission Receipts section within My Marks.

[Closed] Issue with Blackboard receipts

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We have identified an issue with our Blackboard receipting tool, which is currently not always sending out email receipts to students after they have submitted their work. The receipts are always being stored in Blackboard, however.

As a temporary measure, we therefore advise students to check the “Submitted” section of “My Marks” after submitting their work. If a receipt is not recorded there, they should attempt to submit their work again and then contact their school if the issue persists. However, if a receipt is present, they should take a screenshot, note the time, and be assured that their work has been successfully submitted.

We are prioritising this matter and have raised it with Blackboard as an urgent issue. We will provide updates as soon as the issue has been resolved.

Upcoming Talis Aspire Reading List LTI upgrade

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Due to an upcoming depreciation of the current mode of creating a link to Talis Reading lists we will be upgrading to the Talis Aspire Reading List LTI in the week commencing 29th Jan. This will involve a slight change in the way you set up and access the reading lists within your course.

Currently you can add a reading list as a tool link within the course menu or as an item link within the content area, both with the link title “Resource List” These two options will continue but with a change of title to “Talis Aspire Reading List”. The content area link will move from the content Tools menu to the Build Content menu.

The current content area links

The updated content area link.

All existing resource links will continue to work once we have moved to the LTI connection.

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

Questionmark OnDemand Scheduled Maintenance, Saturday 20 January 2024 09.00-15.00

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Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 20 January 2024 between 09:00 and 15:00.

The purpose of the maintenance is to deploy system updates to ensure the ongoing reliability, security and up time of the platform.

During this time users may experience service disruption. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

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