Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
Microsoft discontinued the video discussion app Flip on 1 July, and it is now in view-only mode. If you wish to download your past Flip videos, you can do so until 30 September 2024.
The Flip camera has been integrated into Teams and is available in Classes. To create a Flip video in Teams Classes:
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
The tool we use to provide pop-up support and guidance within Blackboard is changing on Thursday 1 August. This means that the pop-up messages you sometimes see in Blackboard may look a little different, but can still be easily removed by clicking on the ‘x’ in the top right-hand corner.
Please note that this also means you will no longer see ‘Eesysoft course reports’ within Blackboard. If you require additional data that was previously available within the course reports, please contact the Digital Education Office on digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Additionally, you will no longer see an option for “UoB support” within Blackboard. This previously appeared in the bottom right-hand corner of Blackboard when you clicked on the question mark in a speech bubble, which is shown below. You will still see the question mark and can access Blackboard’s help pages by selecting ‘Blackboard support’ and going into ‘Blackboard Help’.
Please refer to our online guides or contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk if you have any queries.
Turnitin has released a new Turnitin Help Center. Users will be able to access past cases through the old support centre until 20 September 2024. After this date, access to the old support centre will no longer be available.
If you have any questions about this change, or would like to know more, please refer to Turnitin’s Frequently Asked Questions page, or contact us at digital.education@bristol.ac.uk.
IT Services will be carrying out essential maintenance on our Xerte server between 8am and 12pm on Tuesday 6th August. This is not an update to the Xerte authoring tool and will not bring any changes to the service.
The tool will be unavailable for periods during this time, we apologise for any inconvenience caused.
We will blog here when the service is available again for staff and students.
On Wednesday 31 July, between 09:00 – 11:00 BST, SafeAssign will undergo a maintenance update.
Learn clients will experience impacts for up to seven hours. All submissions during this time will be queued and will be processed at the end of the maintenance period.
This downtime is essential for a backend infrastructure update, as Blackboard is transitioning to a new infrastructure.
If you have any questions about this update, please refer to the Blackboard status page or email us at digital.education@bristol.ac.uk.
Turnitin has informed us that, from 16 July, two new improvements will be added to the AI writing report:
These changes apply to new submissions only and will not retroactively affect existing submissions.
If you have any questions about these updates, please email us at digital.education@bristol.ac.uk.
On 16 July, Turnitin will upgrade its AI writing detection feature to include a new paraphrasing detection capability. This enhancement will help identify instances where paraphrasing tools have been used to modify AI-generated text in student submissions. The detection will run automatically for all assessments submitted to Turnitin LTI assignments. Therefore, there is no need to update your reassessment submission points to have access to the AI paraphrasing detection tool.
Student-submitted content that may have been modified using an AI paraphrasing tool will be flagged as likely AI-generated in the AI writing report. The report will highlight text that Turnitin’s model predicts was likely written by an AI tool in a different colour from content that was likely AI-written and subsequently modified using an AI paraphrasing tool, to distinguish between them.
Turnitin will not differentiate between likely AI-paraphrased matches and likely AI-generated text in the AI writing report. However, as Turnitin continues to develop and improve this feature, their aim is to include such differentiation in the future.
Turnitin’s paraphrasing detection tool is not designed to target grammar-checking tools like Grammarly, which modify spelling, grammar, and punctuation, but rather other AI content written by large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5.
The University has produced guidance that has been made available to students about Contract Cheating, Academic Integrity, and Using AI at University. Furthermore, it is important to reassure students that ‘Turnitin evidence is always interpreted by academics and used in context, to supplement judgement rather than to replace it’ (Turnitin’s artificial intelligence detector tool).
We will update this blog with additional information as soon as the supplier releases more resources. In the meantime, if you have any questions about this new development, please refer to the Turnitin AI Writing Detection Capabilities or email us at digital.education@bristol.ac.uk.
Turnitin has released additional resources to learn more about the new AI writing detection features in the classic report view:
Please refer to our more recent blog post on this topic.
Due to the deprecation of the Resource List tool by Anthology (Blackboard), you will need to replace the old links with the new Talis Aspire Reading Lists tool to access the reading lists from within your courses.
To replace a link in the left-hand menu in an Original course, click the ‘plus’ symbol at the top of the menu and choose ‘Tool Link’. “Talis Aspire Reading Lists” will appear within the drop-down menu. Once created, click the link to set up your reading list (you may be asked to authenticate the tool on first use); you will then see your reading lists and you will be able to add the required list to your course.
You can also add a link within the content area of your course via the ‘Build Content’ drop-down menu.
If you are using an Ultra course, you can find the Talis Aspire Reading Lists link under ‘Course Tools’.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 20 July between 09:00 and 21:00.
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
We are pleased to announce that Xerte has successfully been upgraded to version 3.12.30 and is available to staff and students. This upgrade has fixed a feedback issue encountered in limited circumstances.
You can read about the new features and enhancements in the Xerte 3.12 release notes.