Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
The supplier has notified us that the ‘Submit on behalf of’ functionality in Turnitin’s assignment inbox has been restored.
The incident occurred between 11 April and 17 April. The impact of the issue was limited, and most Turnitin users were unaffected.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused. If you have any questions, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Turnitin has informed us that the issue causing a delay in Similarity Report generation has now been resolved.
Starting at 9.30 AM today, an unexpected service incident occurred in Turnitin causing a delay in the generation of Similarity Reports. The impact of this issue was limited, and most Turnitin users were unaffected. Students were still able to submit work, although they may have experienced a delay in receiving their report.
If you have any questions or concerns about this issue, or if you believe you have been affected, please get in touch by emailing digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Turnitin is currently experiencing an unexpected service incident, which may result in delays in the generation of Similarity Reports. Students are still able to submit work, but they may experience a delay in receiving their report.
The supplier is aware of the issue and is working to restore full functionality to Turnitin.
If you have any concerns or questions, please contact us by emailing digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
We are aware of an issue affecting the display of the ‘Submit on behalf of’ functionality in Turnitin’s assignment inbox. The issue has been reported to Turnitin Support Engineers, who are currently investigating.
In the meantime, if you need to upload a paper on behalf of a student, there is a workaround available for non-anonymous assignments: selecting the three dots in the Options column for the student and clicking Upload.
For further details, please refer to the guide to Submitting on behalf of a student.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.
The annual creation of Blackboard unit courses has been carried out, and the 2025/26 Blackboard courses are available to access. We are now working on building “parent” courses, where these are needed.
This year, all courses are Ultra courses, using the new Ultra templates created with the faculties. You can find your courses in the usual way, by logging in to Blackboard.
Instructor enrolments are copied from the previous year’s courses, where these exist; instructors will need to be manually enrolled onto all new courses. Please contact your school office if you need to be added to any new Blackboard courses.
Information on training and support for Blackboard Ultra is available on the Blackboard Ultra move project site.
Please note that, because of the early creation of courses, some tools that link to other University services outside Blackboard – such as Re/Play and Talis Aspire Resource Lists – will not be fully functional until those services have carried out their annual switch-over. For Re/Play, links to Collections won’t work until mid-July. For resource lists, links can be added to your 2025-26 lists from Thursday 29 May; please contact lib-resource-lists@bristol.ac.uk or your Subject Librarian if you require any support with this.
If you have any other questions or concerns, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Blackboard is continuing to investigate an intermittent issue with document rendering in the Annotate tool, which is affecting users globally.
When this happens, students submitting assignments with attachments might see an error message asking them to try again later. Please note that this does not stop the submission, but it can be confusing as students cannot view the document’s content during the upload process. However, students can confirm that their submission has been successful by looking at their digital receipt.
Blackboard developers are collaborating with their partners to fix it, and a solution will be included in a future update.
If you have any questions or encounter this issue and need support, please email us at digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
On Saturday 29 March, between 15:00 – 15:30 GMT, Turnitin will be performing maintenance on their system. During this small window of time, Turnitin will be unavailable.
You can stay up to date with the Turnitin system status on the Turnitin status page. We apologise for any inconvenience.
Blackboard is currently investigating an intermittent document rendering issue affecting the Annotate tool. Instructors using Blackboard assignments and attempting to annotate papers via the online interface may be affected.
The supplier is actively working to restore the service to optimal performance, and we are closely monitoring the situation. We will provide updates as we have them.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Re/Play now includes interactive elements to enhance your presentations. With these new features, you can add text, buttons, and hotspots directly onto your videos, helping to guide your students and link to additional content seamlessly.
Getting Started
Open your presentation and click Edit Interactions. This brings up an editor, with a grid to help you accurately place and customise your interactive elements. All elements can be repositioned. For text and hotspots, you can also resize them—hold the Shift key to move without resizing.
Types of Interactions
Best Practices
We hope you enjoy experimenting with these new tools to create more engaging and interactive learning experiences. You can find more information on our Re/Play support pages. If you have any questions or need further support, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
The issue with some assignment submission email receipts not being received was resolved on January 17, and is no longer occurring. Please accept our apologies for not providing a separate update sooner.