Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
On Monday, 9 December at 11:38 AM, Turnitin resolved the issue causing delays in the generation of Turnitin similarity reports.
Students were not affected by this issue and were able to submit their work. The incident did not impact the upload feature or any other functionalities within Turnitin.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
We have been informed that users may currently experience some delays in the generation of Turnitin similarity reports. However, students can continue to submit their work, as this incident does not impact the upload feature or any other functionalities within Turnitin.
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.
Normal access to tools accessed through Blackboard has been resumed. There were issues between 07.44 and 11.13 on December 3.
Original post: https://blackboard.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2024/12/03/open-issues-accessing-other-tools-via-blackboard/
Update: Normal access to tools accessed through Blackboard has been resumed. There were issues between 07.44 and 11.13 today.
There is a global issue creating intermittent issues with accessing other tools and services through Blackboard. This is affecting, for example, access to Re/Play, Turnitin and Marks Extract. The Blackboard engineers have identified the issue and are working on fixing it. We will provide an update on this blog as soon as we have one.
If you have any questions, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Ahead of the assessment period, we would like to remind you of two issues that may interfere with student access to their Turnitin submission points:
We recommend that instructors and administrators edit their Turnitin assignments to open in the same window as the Blackboard page, as opening in a new window may be treated as a “pop-up” window and blocked by some browsers. To do this:
We are aware that people are sometimes seeing the error message ‘Invalid or missing state’ when trying to access Turnitin. This issue has been reported to Turnitin and is linked to the privacy settings of the users’ internet browser.
Please make the following information available to students and staff in your school, to assist them if they encounter this error.
If using Safari, we recommend that users try accessing Turnitin via Chrome or Microsoft Edge in the first instance, as Blackboard and Turnitin submissions have been successfully tested with these University-supported browsers.
If switching browsers is not a suitable solution for you, we suggest updating the browser’s security settings to enable JavaScript and third-party cookies. The ‘Invalid or missing state’ message comes up when launching a Turnitin assignment in a new browser window with third-party cookies and/or JavaScript blocked. This can be resolved by editing the browser’s Privacy & Security preferences so that it will not block any background scripts that Turnitin is trying to load.
Please follow the steps below for your preferred browser:
If you would rather not enable JavaScript and/or third-party cookies in general, please instead add “api.turnitin.com” and “api.turnitinuk.com” to the sites that are allowed to use JavaScript / third-party cookies.
Once you have completed reviewing your browser’s Privacy & Security preferences, please close your active browser and re-open a new browsing session so that any changes can take effect.
If you experience any problems, please contact the DEO via digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Earlier this month, we discovered that some AI writing detection reports in Turnitin had not been generated. Upon investigation, Turnitin confirmed that this was due to an error at their end, and that the issue occurred between 31 July and 5 August.
Today, Turnitin engineers reported that they have regenerated the AI reports for submissions made during that period.
We have spot checked some of the affected submission points and can confirm that the AI reports have now been successfully generated.
We apologise for the inconvenience caused and are grateful for your patience while we were working to resolve this issue. If you have any queries, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
The service has now been restored.
Between 7 August at 21:00 and 9 August at 17:15, Feedback Studio users may have experienced intermittent access to Similarity Reports, encountered issues with downloading copies of the reports and/or digital receipts, or noticed that Similarity Reports were stuck in processing. Further information is available on the Turnitin status page.
If you have any concerns or questions, please contact us at digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
On Saturday 17 August between 14:00 – 22:00 BST, 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.
It has come to our attention that the AI writing detection reports in Turnitin LTI were not generated for submissions made between 1 August and 5 August. We are currently investigating this issue with the supplier and will provide updates as soon as we receive further information from their support team.
In the meantime, if your course has been affected and you need to regenerate these reports, please contact us at digital-education@bristol.ac.uk, providing a list of the affected courses and their respective submission points.
Turnitin has resolved a formatting issue that was affecting the display of information in the assignment inbox. This improvement has resulted in the removal of timestamps from the ‘uploaded’ column. Submission timestamps are now visible only when hovering over the submission date or by downloading the Grade Report from the assignment inbox.
Please note that late submissions will still be highlighted in red.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.