Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
We were informed of a temporary outage of Blackboard email services after close of business yesterday (08 May 2024). This issue affected all Blackboard email services globally, including any Blackboard notifications that were also sent as emails and the production of submission receipts.
Whilst the service has now been restored, we advise you to check and resend any Blackboard emails you attempted to send yesterday.
Blackboard’s “Work Offline” function, which allows you to download a spreadsheet of the Grade Centre, is currently not working as intended. When you attempt to download the Full Grade Centre of a course, some columns that are present online are not downloaded in the spreadsheet. This may affect workflows with offline or in-person assessments.
We have advised the supplier of this issue and they are investigating. In the meantime, the following steps can be followed as a workaround.
Workaround:
This should produce a Smart View that contains all of the columns in the course. Navigate to this smart view and download it as you would normally, choosing to display or not to display hidden info, selecting specific columns, etc., as required.
As we conclude 2023, we wanted to do a quick round-up of our Mentimeter news from the year. We’d also like to remind staff that we have a campus-wide license for Mentimeter, which anyone can sign up to.
This year we have seen our biggest surge of users on Menti, jumping to just under 2000 on our campus-wide license, and another 1000 still using their free accounts. We’ve had some great feedback from staff and students on their use of Menti and are looking forward to hearing about more best-practice examples in 2024.
Below we have noted down some Menti news and new features that we thought users may find useful. As ever, if you have any questions about using Mentimeter, please contact the Digital Education Office.
Mentimeter have developed a series of online self-paced courses for users to complete as part of their continued professional development (CPD). You can improve your presentation skills while at the same time learn more about using Mentimeter in your teaching and training. We have added a number of these courses to the Develop website so you can keep all your CPD in one place.
You can now share your Mentimeter presentations directly in a Teams meeting without having to switch to a browser. Participants can also interact with your presentation in the meeting window, instead of having to go to Menti.com and enter a code.
More information about adding the app to Teams, presenting and participating can be found on this ‘Mentimeter for Microsoft Teams’ page.
You can now add gifs to your presentations as well as images. This is a great add on to graphs and makes results look fun and engaging. Users can learn more about how to do this by going to this Mentimeter website page.
If your presentation contains several multiple-choice questions, you can use the segmentation function to display results grouped by how participants answered a previous question. Segmentation of results can be useful for spotting trends in responses.
More information about using the segmentation functions can be found on this ‘Segmentation of votes’ page.
You can now allow participants to vote on responses given to open-ended questions. Participants can post their responses as usual, then they can vote on each other’s submissions.
More information about enabling the voting function can be found on this ‘Open ended questions’ page.
You can easily move your free account over to our campus wide licence by going to our website page. Please ensure your UoB email matches your Mentimeter email exactly before you upgrade. You can change your email in Menti by going to the profile icon in the top right of the Mentimeter home page and clicking on Settings.
If you have any further queries about using Mentimeter, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk
The final opportunity to submit your teaching software requests to IT Services for TB2 is this Friday, 24 November. If you have already been using specific software in Teaching Block 1 and wish to continue using it in Teaching Block 2, there is no need to resubmit a request for those software applications.
See more information and access the app on the IT Services Teaching and Student Software SharePoint page. Please also complete the feedback form to help IT Services improve the Teaching Software Request App for the 2024/25 academic year. Any additional inquiries should be directed toward IT Services.
Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 16 September 2023 between 09:00 and 15:00.
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.
Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 15 July between 09:00 and 15:00.
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
Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 17 June between 09:00 and 15:00.
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
IT Services has launched a new software request app for teaching staff. The app has been designed to streamline the process of requesting software for the start of the upcoming academic year and enables you to see previous software requests made by your school.
To ensure your request is ready for the start of teaching in September, please submit your request as soon as possible. The deadline for submission is 16 June 2023.
Access the app and find out more on the Teaching and Student Software SharePoint page.
If you need technical support with the app, please contact the IT Service Desk using the self-service site.
Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 20 May between 09:00 and 15:00.
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
To fix the issue affecting marking groups in Turnitin, please try refreshing the Assignment Inbox, using the refresh button in the top right-hand corner.
Step-by-step guide: