Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
An issue has been identified with the Blackboard tool used to bulk upload feedback documents to students (using the B1 workflow). Students and staff may find that, after upload and release of feedback is complete, they do not have access to the feedback files.
We apologise for any inconvenience. Blackboard have been informed and are working to resolve the issue. If you are, or may be, affected by this and need advice, please contact the DEO – digital-education@bristol.ac.uk
As an Instructor, if under “My Courses” or “My Organisations” on your Blackboard home page you see “not currently available” or “unavailable” after the course name, this means the course is unavailable to students. Instructors can still access and edit the course.
If you have any problems or queries, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
School / faculty administrators or Student Administration Managers (SAMs) are busy setting up reassessments. This is a reminder that videos covering the process are available from BEAM:
https://uob.sharepoint.com/sites/beam/SitePages/reassessment-training.aspx
User Guides and Reference Guides:
https://uob.sharepoint.com/sites/beam/SitePages/manage-reassessment.aspx
We have a new FAQ:
How do I make my reassessment available on a specific date?
Go to the submission point, select Edit and then add the dates and times in the in the ‘Availability’ section under ‘Display After’ and ‘Display Until’ .
Please ensure you have also watched Video 6 on how to allocate reassessment groups and make your assessment visible to students.
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.
The Blackboard upgrade has been completed, and Blackboard is available again now. Please accept our apologies for the delay in completing the upgrade. We have tested all key functionality, and are continuing with further in-depth testing.
If you come across anything that isn’t behaving as you expect it to, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
The Blackboard upgrade has taken longer than anticipated, and consequently the Blackboard downtime has been extended to 1 pm today. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience this causes.
This is a final reminder that the Digital Education Office will be upgrading Blackboard from 5 pm today, Wednesday 5th August 2020. Blackboard will be unavailable until midday on Thursday 6th August.
This update is part of essential service maintenance. The core Blackboard functionality and interface will remain the same, but the upgrade will allow us to explore integration with Microsoft Office 365.
Last week, the data in Syllabus+ was changed from the 19-20 to the 20-21 academic year, ahead of the August 1 rollover. Consequently, the student groups automatically created in Blackboard courses from this data were also updated. This means that any submission points that were controlled by adaptive release for these groups will no longer be available to the 19-20 students. We are working on resetting these groups. In the meantime, to make the marks and feedback in any affected submission points available to students in Blackboard, please make the relevant column in the Grade Centre available to students, and provide them with a link to “My Grades” in the Blackboard course.
Please accept our apologies for this unexpected issue.
UPDATE: This issue has been fixed. The 19-20 groups in Blackboard have now been reset with the correct student enrolments.
The annual Blackboard course rollover is being delayed in order to allow as many schools as possible to take advantage of the new standard Blackboard templates. Therefore, your 2020 courses may not be available to you until the week beginning August 10th. For schools that have adopted the templates, their 2020 courses are already being made available. If you have any queries, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
The Digital Education Office will be upgrading Blackboard from 5 pm on Wednesday 5th August 2020. Blackboard will be unavailable until midday on Thursday 6th August. (Please note that these dates have been changed from those announced earlier, following consultation with schools.)
This update is part of essential service maintenance. The core Blackboard functionality and interface will remain the same, but the upgrade will allow us to explore integration with Microsoft Office 365.