Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
On Tuesday, 19 November, between 11:00 and 13:00, SafeAssign will undergo a maintenance update.
During this time, the service will be completely unavailable, and any submissions will need to be resubmitted after the maintenance. This upgrade is critical for improving system performance and ensuring more efficient plagiarism detection for Blackboard.
If you have any questions about this update, please refer to the Blackboard support, or email us at digital.education@bristol.ac.uk.
We have been made aware of reports of issues with the Record Now software that is used to manually create recordings in rooms. This problem has not affected the recordings of scheduled activities but may mean that there was a delay in publishing these to Re/Play.
IT services have now resolved this issue. If students have reported that they are having problems accessing recordings they should be able to retry the service now.
Please see the IT service status pages for further information.
The University will update its current offline marking tool, which allows administrators to bulk download and upload assessments, starting in October 2024. The update will not change the functionality of the tool, and all older files will still be available.
Why is this happening?
Blackboard no longer supports our current version of the offline marking tool, which allows administrators to bulk download and upload assessments. They will be replacing our old Marks and Feedback extension with a newer version that uses a more modern integration standard, called Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI). This change was planned to take place during the summer break, but technical issues have pushed it back until now.
LTI benefits
Key differences
The new Marks and Feedback tool mirrors the functionalities of the old version. There are slight differences in the menu for accessing the new tool. However, the overall functionality will remain the same, and the student experience will not be affected. The key differences are:
Key dates
After 30 September 2024, the existing Marks and Feedback extension will be unavailable for downloads, uploads and releasing grades. From 1 October, new Blackboard offline assignments will use the Marks and Feedback LTI. Files that were submitted before this change, and to old courses, will still be available in the new tool.
How to access the new Marks and Feedback tool
Depending on whether your course is using Blackboard Original or Blackboard Ultra, you will have different ways of accessing the tool.
For Blackboard Original, instructors will be able to access the tool via Course Tools under Course Management. The ‘Assignment Anonymity’ tool will be replaced by ‘Marks and Feedback Settings’, while ‘Marks and Feedback’ will replace the following items:
In the image to the right, the items highlighted in red will be replaced by the Marks and Feedback LTI tool links, in green. (Please click on the image to enlarge it.)
For Blackboard Ultra, instructors will need to navigate to the Course Content area and then click on the right-hand Course Tools section to open the panel showing ‘Marks and Feedback’ as well as ‘Marks and Feedback Settings’.
In the image to the left, you can see the new LTI tool links highlighted in green. (Please click on the image to enlarge it.)
Useful links
Further information
Any further updates will be added to this blog. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
We’re excited to announce the launch of the new ‘Grade Approval’ tool for transferring marks from Blackboard to SITS/eVision. This advanced tool features a powerful new search function, enabling quick and efficient identification of students and assessment marks. While the functionality remains the same, Blackboard have significantly improved the user interface, making it easier to transfer marks from Blackboard to SITS/eVision.
The new tool is now available for both Original and Ultra courses. It replaces the ‘Mark Approval and Transfer’ tool (which was available from the Grade Centre > Manage area). Please refer to the updated guidance on BEAM – specifically, section 3.2 for extracting marks for assessment, and section 4 for reassessment, for Original courses. Information about mark extraction in Ultra courses is included in the Ultra Assessment Workflows guidance.
If you have any queries, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Detailed instructions about how to create new Resource List links in Blackboard Original courses, using the updated Talis Aspire tool, can now be found on the Library website (support guide 5: “Publishing and sharing your list”), alongside contextual information on creating and managing the lists themselves. If you need support with updating your links, or with Resource Lists in general, please contact lib-resource-lists@bristol.ac.uk, including the unit code and name of your unit in the message.
To create new Resource List links in Blackboard Ultra courses, please follow the DEO guidance.
The old links are still working, allowing you to refer to these while creating your new links, but will stop working by the end of September, so please create the new links as soon as possible. Note that the Resource Lists themselves do not need to be updated – these will still work fine – it’s only the links to the Lists from inside Blackboard that need updating. Any links created by the old method, such as those copied from a previous year’s course, should be deleted once the new links have been created.
Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.
As part of the improvements to the ways other tools are integrated with Blackboard, the Talis Aspire Reading Lists integration has been upgraded, so the links in this coming year’s Blackboard courses to Talis Aspire Reading Lists (or Resource Lists) will need to be updated accordingly. Note that the Talis Lists themselves do not need to be updated – these will still work fine – it’s only the links to the Lists from inside Blackboard that need updating. Unfortunately, there is no way to automatically convert the old links to the new format, so the links will need to be re-added, following our guidance. Any links created by the old method, such as those copied from a previous year’s course, should be deleted.
Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.
If you have any questions, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Each year, the Digital Education Office delivers a plan of work on our digital education environments and systems. This plan includes any significant system changes or software upgrades, but also includes more minor changes to systems and processes, ensuring everything works well for the next academic year.
We have updated the Service Improvements page, documenting and advertising completed work and letting you know what to expect in terms of improvements before the start of term. Any major changes will also have been announced via other channels, such as this blog and the staff bulletins.
We are currently working on enhancing the marks extraction tool that transfers marks from Blackboard to eVision/SITS. During this time, you might encounter issues with transferring marks for assessments that have due dates/times. We are actively working with our service provider (Anthology) on resolving these problems and expect to have them fixed by September 6. Marks for assessments with a due date/time that need to be transferred out of Blackboard before September 6 should be manually entered into eVision/SITS.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
If you have any queries, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
On Monday, 26 August, between 10:00 and 13:00, SafeAssign will undergo a maintenance update.
SafeAssign users may experience disruptions for up to two hours while the service is temporarily unavailable. Once the maintenance is complete, Blackboard submissions using SafeAssign will be processed with a delay. However, no data loss is expected.
This downtime is necessary for a backend infrastructure update as SafeAssign transitions to a new system.
If you have any questions about this update, please refer to the Blackboard status page, or email us at digital.education@bristol.ac.uk.
An error has been identified in Blackboard Annotate that can affect the display of submitted Microsoft Power Point (PPTX) documents containing grouped images. The error rearranges the images displayed in the Annotate interface, affecting the marker’s view of the document.
Blackboard developers are aware of the error. However, they cannot fix the issue, as it depends on third-party software beyond their control.
This error affects the DEO’s “Blackboard Online” workflow, and we have updated the recommendations in our EMA – Blackboard Online Workflow guidance to remind users that Blackboard Annotate works better when files are submitted in PDF format. While students can still submit documents in other formats, we cannot guarantee that footnotes, grouped images, and styling will be displayed correctly.