Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
Turnitin have announced on Saturday November 5, the following services will be unavailable from 1pm – 6pm GMT due to necessary scheduled maintenance:
• Turnitin (including mobile)
• TurnitinUK
• iThenticate
• WriteCheck
• Integrations
Where applicable, please be aware no submissions or grading will be possible through any of the services listed above during this time. We therefore advise that submission deadlines be set outside of this maintenance window.
Blackboard course (unit) rollover will take place on 1 August 2016. We recommend that staff do not edit 2015/16 courses after 5 pm on Friday 29 July, as changes made after this time may not be copied into the 2016/17 courses. All 2016/17 courses should be available to staff by 2 August.
Mediasite links will automatically be added to those 2016/17 courses which have Mediasite links in 2015/16 courses. The links will automatically update to the associated 2016/17 catalogue, where the Mediasite recordings are surfaced for students to view, once live.
Turnitin assignments will be copied into 2016/17 courses, but given new start, end, and post dates – so these will need to be changed before making the courses available to students. Note that Turnitin set an expiry date for all assignments in a course that is six months after the course creation date (ie 31 January 2017), after which all Turnitin assignments in the course will become read-only. This expiry date is automatically changed to the latest post date of any Turnitin assignment in the course – so it is worth adjusting the dates as early as possible.
A table showing details of how Blackboard course elements are copied during rollover can be found here.
If you have any questions, please contact tel-help@bristol.ac.uk.
We have recently encountered an issue whereby staff editing Turnitin submission points in Blackboard, with multiple Blackboard tabs open in the same web browser, have accidentally overwritten part of a submission point with information from another tab. We therefore strongly recommend that while editing Turnitin submission points in Blackboard you only have one Blackboard tab open in your browser (Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc). We are investigating the underlying causes of this issue with both Blackboard and Turnitin.
Tunitin have released an update for their integration with Blackboard that addresses a potentially problematic issue. This update adds a confirmation message when a member of staff clicks on one of the “Delete Assignment” links that can be found on the Turnitin Assignments page. As deleting a Turnitin Assignment without asking for confirmation could cause significant problems, we have decided to apply this update promptly.
There will therefore be a brief outage of access to Turnitin via Blackboard at 8 am on Tuesday 26 January. 8 am to 9 am will be an “at risk” period, during which users may experience a slight degradation in speed of access to Turnitin as the update is rolled out across the Blackboard servers.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
An update to the Turnitin system within Blackboard has brought a new feature – the ability for staff to delete any Turnitin assignment from the list of assignments shown when you click on “Turnitin Assignments” under Course Tools in the course’s Control Panel. Unfortunately, the “Delete Assignment” link appears directly under the “Sync Grades” link for each assignment – and there is no confirmation step, so as soon as you click on the link the assignment is deleted. There is thus a small chance that an assignment could be deleted accidentally by a member of staff trying to sync grades. This will delete the submission point, all assignments submitted to it, and the associated column with all its grades from the Grade Centre.
We are working with Turnitin to adjust this, but in the meantime we would urge you to take extra care when on the “Turnitin Assignments” page in Blackboard courses.
Turnitin have announced that their services will be mostly unavailable during a scheduled maintenance period on Saturday, 19 December 2015, from 15.00 to 19.00.
An announcement will appear to users within Turnitin in advance of when the system will be unavailable for the scheduled maintenance.
The earlier Turnitin issue has been resolved, and normal service has now been resumed.
Turnitin is experiencing a global intermittent issue that impacts submissions. They are working to resolve this and will provide updates.
Turnitin have announced that their services will be mostly unavailable during a scheduled maintenance period on Saturday, 19 September 2015, from 15.00 to 19.00.
An announcement will appear to users within Turnitin in advance of when the system will be unavailable for the scheduled maintenance.
Turnitin have announced that their services will be mostly unavailable during a scheduled maintenance period on Saturday, 15 August 2015, from 15.00 to 19.00.
An announcement will appear to users within Turnitin in advance of when the system will be unavailable for the scheduled maintenance.