Category: Blackboard

Blackboard course rollover 2020 complete

Posted on by Hanrahan Highland

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.

Blackboard upgrade 2020, 5 pm today (5 August)

Posted on by Hanrahan Highland

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.

Some Blackboard submission points not currently available to students

Posted on by Hanrahan Highland

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.

Blackboard 2020 courses delayed, new templates available

Posted on by Hanrahan Highland

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.

Blackboard upgrade 2020, 5 – 6 August

Posted on by Hanrahan Highland

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. 

Blackboard assignment display issue for Word files saved in Pages/LibreOffice

Posted on by Dan Wilson

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.