Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
Blackboard will be performing scheduled infrastructure maintenance for Collaborate on Thursday, July 23 between midnight and 4 am. Collaborate will experience intermittent availability during this maintenance window.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.
The Digital Education Office will be upgrading Blackboard from 5 pm on Monday 3rd August 2020. Blackboard will be unavailable until midday on Tuesday 4th August.
This update brings a range of performance and feature improvements, as well as important bug fixes, to Blackboard.
We have had a very small number of reports of issues with Box view incorrectly rendering and displaying some files, especially tables. The file itself can still be downloaded without issue.
We have carried out testing and confirmed with Blackboard that the issue only occurs when the student uses a non-Microsoft application such as LibreOffice or Pages to write/edit their work but then saves as a Microsoft Word document.
Depending on the marking workflow there are two ways around this issue.
1. If using B1 or similar workflows which downloads the file, the Box view can be ignored as the download is functioning correctly. The student may need some reassurance that their file has uploaded correctly – they can download from the Review page and check the file is correct there.
2. If using B2 or similar workflows which mark using the Box view, the student can be instructed to save as a PDF (rather than as a Word document) which, when uploaded, will render correctly in Box view.
Due to the very specific circumstances in which this occurs, we anticipate this only affecting an extremely small minority of submissions.
Blackboard have informed us that this maintenance is not needed on our system, so there will be no downtime on Sunday 31 May.
Please accept our apologies for the unnecessary earlier announcement.
UPDATE: Blackboard have informed us that this maintenance is not required on our system, so there will be no downtime.
In order to ensure the stability of Blackboard during the exam period, essential maintenance will be carried out on the system between 7am and 8am (BST) on Sunday 31 May. During this time, Blackboard will not be available, so please plan accordingly.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this downtime causes.
There will be a possible service disruption on Turnitin on Wednesday 22nd April from 08:00 to 13:00. This is due to Turnitin requiring time for emergency maintenance. Marking may be disrupted during this time and students using Turnitin may have to retry their submissions.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused, and for making you aware to this maintenance at short notice. Unfortunately Turnitin did not give us the usual amount of warning for this work. For more information please see the Turnitin Status page.
If you have any questions, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk .
Blackboard will be performing scheduled maintenance for Collaborate between 11 pm on Wednesday 8 April and 3 am on Thursday 9 April. You will experience intermittent availability of the scheduler, sessions and recordings during this time. Blackboard will try to minimise downtime and will not necessarily use the entire maintenance window.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this causes.
The planned maintenance of Blackboard has been completed, and the service is available again.
We are planning a minor, but essential, update to Blackboard between 10 pm on Sunday 2 February and 9 am on Monday 3 February. Blackboard will be unavailable during this period and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.
Turnitin’s scheduled maintenance was completed on the 4th January. All services are now back to normal. They have advised you may need to restart your browser and in some cases, clear your browser’s cache before accessing Turnitin.
If you have any queries please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk