Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
We have been made aware that some instructors and students are seeing the error message ‘invalid or missing state’ when trying to access Turnitin when using Safari or Firefox. We are currently investigating the issue with Turnitin; in the meantime, please use Chrome or Edge, as these browsers do not appear to be affected.
We apologise for any inconvenience.
We were informed of a temporary outage of Blackboard email services after close of business yesterday (08 May 2024). This issue affected all Blackboard email services globally, including any Blackboard notifications that were also sent as emails and the production of submission receipts.
Whilst the service has now been restored, we advise you to check and resend any Blackboard emails you attempted to send yesterday.
Blackboard has successfully resolved the issue with their receipting tool. Consequently, students submitting work to a Blackboard Assignment should now receive a confirmation email containing the details of the submitted work and a link to the document.
Please note that the issue only impacted student submissions to Blackboard Assignments on Tuesday, 7 May. Nevertheless, all receipts were securely stored in Blackboard, and students were able to access their submission records by navigating to the Submission Receipts section within My Marks.
We have identified an issue with our Blackboard receipting tool, which is currently not always sending out email receipts to students after they have submitted their work. The receipts are always being stored in Blackboard, however.
As a temporary measure, we therefore advise students to check the “Submitted” section of “My Marks” after submitting their work. If a receipt is not recorded there, they should attempt to submit their work again and then contact their school if the issue persists. However, if a receipt is present, they should take a screenshot, note the time, and be assured that their work has been successfully submitted.
We are prioritising this matter and have raised it with Blackboard as an urgent issue. We will provide updates as soon as the issue has been resolved.
The issue with Blackboard Assist has been rectified and the service is now functioning correctly.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
We are aware that the Blackboard menu item “Assist” is currently unavailable, we are working with Blackboard to rectify this issue as quickly as possible.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Due to an upcoming depreciation of the current mode of creating a link to Talis Reading lists we will be upgrading to the Talis Aspire Reading List LTI in the week commencing 29th Jan. This will involve a slight change in the way you set up and access the reading lists within your course.
Currently you can add a reading list as a tool link within the course menu or as an item link within the content area, both with the link title “Resource List” These two options will continue but with a change of title to “Talis Aspire Reading List”. The content area link will move from the content Tools menu to the Build Content menu.
The current content area links
The updated content area link.
All existing resource links will continue to work once we have moved to the LTI connection.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 20 January 2024 between 09:00 and 15:00.
The purpose of the maintenance is to deploy system updates to ensure the ongoing reliability, security and up time of the platform.
During this time users may experience service disruption. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
In a prior blog post, we announced that Blackboard was deprecating support for the Receipting Building Block, which we use to customise the receipts students receive when submitting work to a Blackboard Assignment. This would have resulted in changes to the email receipt that students receive after submission.
Following further discussions with Blackboard, we are pleased to announce that these changes will no longer be implemented, meaning that:
The default wording on student receipts will continue to be:
Your submission has been received. We have recorded the following details:
Submission ID: ID NUMBER
User: STUDENT NAME
Student ID: STUDENT NUMBER
Assignment: NAME OF SUBMITTED DOCUMENT(S)
Course: NAME OF COURSE
Date of Submission: SUBMISSION DATE AND TIME
This submission contained the following attached files:
LINK TO FILES AND SIZE OF FILES
Please retain this email receipt. Do not reply to this email. If you have any queries about your submission, please contact your school.
Blackboard has a scheduled Amazon Web Services maintenance window on Tuesday, 12 December, starting at 1 am GMT, with a duration of 1 hour. During this window, there is a possibility the Blackboard home page may be unavailable and users may see a “503 Service Temporary Unavailable” error message.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.