Category: Replay

This issue is now resolved – see here for the update.

We are aware of an issue affecting the automatic recording of some lectures since 26 September. Although the majority of scheduled recordings were processed correctly, for some sessions the recording ‘red light’ did not come on, and the session was not recorded.

Work has been undertaken on 26 September to mitigate this issue for future recordings. 

Important! If you do not see the red light come on when you begin a session that you want recorded, please use Record Now to manually start the session. Full instructions on manually recording using Record Now are found from our Lecture Capture pages. The recording will appear in your ‘My Re/Play’ area, but can be added to your Blackboard course space in a number of ways.

In order for lectures to be triggered to record (either automatically or manually), they need to be held in Re/Play equipped rooms. The list of Central Teaching Spaces contains information on whether a room is equipped to record.

We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused by this issue.

This post summarises the current status of the Re/Play service giving details of what is working, what has been fixed and any open issues.

Open issues are listed below and provide details of any workarounds that can be used and when a fix will be applied.

Background on this week’s incident and current status

A problem with access to Re/Play recordings was identified around midday on Monday 7 February. The issue involved students losing access to Re/Play materials accessed via the left-hand menu in Blackboard. This was resolved on the morning of Tuesday 8 February and has been working without incident since that time.

Please note the following features of Re/Play are currently working normally and being used intensively:

• lecture capture and automated recordings of teaching
• creation and upload of new materials
• streaming of live lectures
• student access to video content through channels, the Re/Play course menu item and via URL links to content.

Outstanding issue: Now Resolved – see the update on 11 February

• No access to Re/Play materials added via the “Build Content” menu option

Since 10.30 am on Tuesday 8th February materials uploaded to Blackboard using “Build Content” have not been usable. There are five common ways materials from Re/Play are added into Blackboard. ‘Build Content’ is one of the less frequently used methods.

*Update*: work to resolve this problem was completed on Friday 11 February.

Workaround: DEO has posted instructions on how to make materials available to students who need them urgently.

Other issues currently identified

• Staff access to some TB1 2021 materials removed

From Monday 31st January staff may have been unable to access some TB1 21/22 materials housed in Re/Play. No content has been lost or deleted and student access is unaffected.

Work to resolve this problem is planned for the week commencing 14 February 2022.

Workaround: DEO can restore access to materials if they are needed urgently.

• Links to materials copied from old courses not working

There have been a small number of reports of issues when re-using content from previous years courses.

Work to resolve this issue is substantially complete. A final review and institutional fix will be applied in week commencing 21 February 2022. We will also update guidance for staff on how to re-use materials.

Workaround: Simple instructions can been used by DEO and school staff to resolve this issue.

• Student access to materials embedded using iframes – resolved

In the summer of 2021, there was a change to the way University systems authenticate users online. Following this change, videos embedded in Blackboard using an iframe need to be set to ‘Everyone can view’ in the Mediasite permissions in order to play.

Resolution: this was resolved in archived courses and for existing materials in 2021/22 Blackboard courses by DEO and IT Services work over the summer to replace embedded content.

For content added this year, updating permissions is a simple step which can be done by school staff. DEO have now resolved the issue for all new 21/22 content in Blackboard and will be running weekly reports to check that permission settings have not been changed.

Current situation and support

Despite the issues listed above, our use of Re/Play continues to be very strong; for example, between 20 September and 22 November 2021, almost 253,000 hours of materials were watched by our students. This data underlines the potential impact of issues and the criticality of the Re/Play service, and we sincerely apologise for any stress and disruption to colleagues and our students.

As you might expect, the DEO Helpdesk is very busy at the moment. To ensure we maintain good response times, the number of staff responding to inquiries to digital-education@bristol.ac.uk has been significantly increased while we work through the backlog of inquiries.

This post is a further update to the issue first identified on 07 February, where the Re/Play link in the Blackboard left-hand menu was displaying an error message, and students could not access materials.

As reported earlier today, all students should now be able to access Re/Play materials shared via left-hand menu links in Blackboard. Automated recordings of teaching have not been affected by the technical bug and will still be available after 48 hours or when published by the academic staff member.

However, we are still applying fixes to some pre-existing problems with Re/Play which might affect the ability of some students to view some videos in Blackboard.

We have Blackboard and Sonic Foundry engineers working to resolve these issues and plan to apply another fix tomorrow. If your students are being affected and you urgently need them to be able to access a recording, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk so that we can assist.

 

This is an update to the issue reported on 07 February, where access to Re/Play from the Blackboard menu was not working.

As of 11.00am on 08 February, we believe that access has now been restored, and students should be able to view recordings as normal via the Re/Play menu link in Blackboard courses. We are now in the process of thoroughly testing this fix, so please let us know if students are still experiencing issues viewing recordings via the Re/Play course link.

If you have questions please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk