The University will be closed for Christmas from 23rd Dec 2017 – 2nd Jan 2017 inclusive, and the Digital Education Office will be unavailable. Please email Digital-Education@bristol.ac.uk as usual and we will respond as soon as possible when we return. If you experience urgent problems during this time (for example, a service is unavailable) please contact the Service Desk on ( 0117 92) 87870
Turnitin have reported some difficulties with their login processes between 5.40pm and 6.32pm on Wed 1 Nov which would have prevented users from logging in and / or accessing the Turnitin service through Blackboard. This has now been resolved and Turnitin is available as normal.
Apologies for any inconvenience that may have been caused.
Digital Education Office
Turnitin have reported some difficulties with their login processes between 11.37pm Weds 23rd Oct and 6am Thurs 24th Oct which would have prevented users from logging in and / or accessing the Turnitin service through Blackboard. This has now been resolved and Turnitin is available as normal.
Apologies for any inconvenience that may have been caused.
Digital Education Office
We are experiencing some problems accessing Turnitin in some of our Blackboard courses following our upgrade yesterday. If you find that you have lost access to the Turnitin tool in your course please follow these steps:
From the Course Management menu click Customisation > Tool Availability and then put a tick next to the Turnitin options in the page of tools that appears > click submit. (please leave Turnitin basic tools unticked)
We have now upgraded Blackboard and changed the visual theme. Find out more about the new theme through our previous blog post. You can find further information, including guides to creating banners to differentiate between courses on our web pages.
Unfortunately we are experiencing a problem with Turnitin at the moment. We are working with our suppliers to remedy this as soon as possible and will update this blog with any further information.
One or two courses with customised themes may need to be changed. Please see the information on this page
As part of the move to external hosting project, we will be upgrading Blackboard to version Q4 2016. This brings many improvements and increased functionality as well as a new visual theme. Accessibility and mobile improvements will remove course themes and course menu colour customisation options.
The Learn 2016 Theme is cleaner and has ‘responsive design’ elements, allowing it to resize and reorder content to take best advantage of the screen size. It will give users a more consistent experience across devices and is optimised for delivery over mobile. Many functions that previously did not work well on mobile devices, such as discussion boards and tests, are much improved.
This theme has been created to follow accessibility standards (WCAG 2.0 principles [link: https://www.w3.org/2004/10/wcag2-nav/wcag20princ.html]) which results in a clearer design that works for all users. Good practice such as keyboard navigation and suitable colour contrast are built into the theme with no need for users to enable them prior to use. To further improve accessibility, legacy ‘course themes’ and colour customisation features have been removed. Course differentiation can be achieved using banners and images, we will provide guidance on how to create and upload graphical content using free online tools. Contact us at tel-help@bristol.ac.uk to arrange support/training. We can run bespoke sessions for a school or teaching team on request.
The screenshots below show a course with the old theme (top) and new theme (bottom):
Blackboard will be:
This summer, in response to user feedback, we are improving the resilience, reliability and scalability of Blackboard, as well as introducing new tools and features. This means that there will be changes to the availability of blackboard between Friday 21 July and Tuesday 25 July, full details of the move can be found here.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep our blog updated with any further information.
Turnitin is now working normally and all users can submit to the service again; apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Following the recent incidents affecting the availability of Blackboard and other University services, IT Services have identified some essential maintenance work which will improve the resilience of these services, reducing both the likelihood and the impact of any incidents in the future. In order to undertake this essential and urgent work, we are planning to make Blackboard unavailable from 7 am on Friday 24 February; it should be available again by 2 pm that afternoon.
We are, of course, aware that any significant period of Blackboard downtime will be disruptive, and are doing our best to minimise the impact. If you have any concerns or questions about this work, please get in touch with us at tel-help@bristol.ac.uk, and please accept our apologies for the inevitable inconvenience it will cause.
We are currently collecting information on critical activities for Blackboard and QuestionMark Perception for this coming academic year. Critical activities are those for which it is essential that TEL systems such as Blackboard or QMP are available, such as assignment submissions or online exams.
Critical activity information is very important as it is used to schedule downtime for essential maintenance to Blackboard, QMP and other systems with the least disruption to you and your students. The information also helps us and IT Services to more effectively support students and staff in the event of an unexpected disruption to Blackboard, QMP, Turnitin or related services (such as MyBristol).
Please click this link http://tinyurl.com/zjb8szf and follow the instructions outlined in the form to send us the required information.
Thank you very much
TEL team