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.

The Blackboard upgrade has taken longer than anticipated, and consequently the Blackboard downtime has been extended to 1 pm today. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience this causes.

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.

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 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.