Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
The video feedback feature in Blackboard assignments will be unavailable between midnight and 3 am on Thursday 25 November to allow for maintenance. During this time, you will be unable to create new video feedback comments or to access existing video feedback comments.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
We are aware of a new, infrequent issue where some people are receiving 404 errors when attempting to open certain documents in Blackboard when using Edge. This error is currently being investigated by Blackboard and will be fixed in a future update.
To access the documents, please use an alternative browser, or right-click on the document link and select ‘Save As’ to download a copy of the document. Alternatively:
Our apologies for the inconvenience. Please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk if you have any questions.
We have identified an error when using the LaTeX maths editor in Blackboard that causes a significant time lag when trying to enter code into the editor. We have raised the issue with Blackboard and they are working on a fix that will be applied in a future update, but they have not yet provided a timescale for this. Investigation suggests that this issue is related to LaTeX equations that have been (correctly) entered into the editor between double dollar signs ($$…$$). To work around this issue, therefore, these equations can be re-created using the ‘MathType’ equation editor itself rather than LaTeX code.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused. We will provide an update as soon as Blackboard provide one. If you have any queries, please contact us.
Some users may currently be experiencing an issue connecting to the Re/Play service, which is affecting playback of videos in Blackboard. We are working with the supplier to investigate and resolve this problem.
We will provide updates on this blog as soon as we have them. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.
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.
This has now been resolved – please see the update blog post for more details.
We have been informed of a bug affecting group submissions to Blackboard assignments. This does not affect individual Blackboard assignments or Turnitin assignments.
Update 10/11/21: This issue appears to be intermittent so may not affect all assignment submissions.
When a student submits to a group assignment, the bug means that they may be presented with an error message: ‘Failed to submit Assignment. Please try again.’ Additionally, the submission may not generate any receipt so students will not receive a confirmation email. Despite this, the submission will be successful.
We have reported and further escalated the issue with Blackboard, and they are working on a fix as a matter of priority.
We also wanted to reassure students that their submissions have been made, despite the error message and lack of receipt. Students can check if their submission has been successful as follows:
We apologise for the inconvenience and will blog again as soon as we hear anything further from Blackboard. If you have any concerns or questions, please get in contact with us: digital-education@bristol.ac.uk
As coursework submissions start, schools should please ensure that Blackboard Grade Centre columns are hidden from students until marks and feedback are ready to be released. To prevent students from seeing marks too early, you should also ensure Total and Weighted Total columns are hidden. Check a column header for a circle with a red line through it which indicates the column is hidden from students.
If it is not hidden, and you need to hide it, click the down arrow next to the column header and select Hide from students (on/off).
If this option isn’t available, or if the column has a green tick next to it, you will need to hide it in a different way:
For Turnitin users, please be aware that a persistent bug means you must make the submission point unavailable after making any changes to the settings. For more details, please see our previous blog post on Turnitin submission point availability issues.
For more information on administering Electronic Management of Assessment workflows, please see our EMA guidance page.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Blackboard have advised us that there will be scheduled Blackboard Collaborate maintenance taking place on Thursday, October 14th, between midnight and 4 am. During this time, users will experience intermittent availability. The purpose of the maintenance is to update Collaborate to version v21.18. You can read about improvements to functionality and features on the Collaborate Release Notes page.
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.
An issue has caused activity groups from last year to appear alongside this year’s groups in Blackboard courses. If you have set up Qwickly by Course Groups, in many cases the result is duplicate activity groups appearing in the Qwickly Attendance tool. You may therefore find two instances with the same name, one containing students and one empty.
If you are taking attendance by group in the Qwickly Attendance tool, you may need to click on both instances of a group to find the one that contains students – if a group contains students, they will be listed on the page as soon as you select the group.
To resolve this issue, we are working on removing timetabling groups that do not contain any students.
There are two options you can take in Blackboard to manage this issue while we are working on a fix.
The DEO will blog again when we have more information on an institutional fix. Please be assured that this does not impact the use of Qwickly to take attendance from the start of term.
As mentioned above, to manage this issue while we are working on a fix you can rename or delete the empty groups. To do this:
The recent problems with the slow loading of the Qwickly Course Tools on the Blackboard home page have now been resolved.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience.