This post summarises the current status of the Re/Play service giving details of what is working, what has been fixed and any open issues.

Open issues are listed below and provide details of any workarounds that can be used and when a fix will be applied.

Background on incident which occurred on the 7th February and current status

A problem with access to Re/Play recordings was identified around midday on Monday 7th February. The issue involved students losing access to Re/Play materials accessed via the left-hand menu in Blackboard. This was resolved on the morning of Tuesday 8 February and has been working without incident since that time.

Please note the following features of Re/Play are currently working normally and being used intensively:

• lecture capture and automated recordings of teaching
• creation and upload of new materials
• streaming of live lectures
• student access to video content through channels, the Re/Play course menu item and via URL links to content.

Open issue

• Links to materials copied from old courses not working and students being returned to Homepage after clicking a link to old content

There have been a small number of reports of issues when re-using content from previous years courses.

Work to resolve this issue is substantially complete. A final review was due to take place in the week commencing 21 February 2022 but has been put back due to industrial action. 

Workaround: A simple fix has been used by DEO and school staff to resolve this issue.

Resolved issues

• Staff access to some TB1 2021 materials removed – From Monday 31st January staff may have been unable to access some TB1 21/22 materials housed in Re/Play. No content has been lost or deleted and student access is unaffected. This issue was resolved by the 24th March.
• No access to Re/Play materials added via the “Build Content” menu option – resolved
• Student access to materials embedded using iframes – resolved

Current situation and support

Despite the issues listed above our use of RePlay continues to be very strong, for example between 20 September and 22 November 2021 almost 253,000 hours of materials were watched by our students. This data underline the potential impact of issues and the criticality of the Re/Play service and we sincerely apologies for any stress and disruption to colleagues and our students.

For help and advice please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk

Some TurningPoint users may have been aware that PowerPoint Polling has been greyed out and unavailable when opening TurningPoint. This can be resolved by setting a repair in the Microsoft applications. Please complete the following steps. You may need to restart your computer.

1. Click the Windows Icon (the four small squares in the bottom left of your screen)
2. Click Settings Cog
3. Click Apps
4. Scroll down until you reach Microsoft Office 365 Apps for Enterprise – en-us
5. Select this with a single click
6. Click Modify
7. When prompted click Yes
8. When prompted select Online Repair, and then click Repair. You may have to restart your computer after the repair process is complete.

Most staff on laptops should be able to apply this fix. Those on desktops may require admin rights in which case IT Services would need to be notified to assist in running the fix. Please quote Incident# 61639 in your ticket to IT services.

Helpful hint

A helpful hint when using PowerPoint polling in TurningPoint is to set TurningPoint to open when you open PowerPoint. Complete the following steps.

1. Open TurningPoint.
2. Click on the Settings, which is the cog icon in the bottom right of the screen.
3. Select Software.
4. Under application, ensure ‘Add-in always loaded’ is checked.
5. Select Close.

If you have any questions, please contact the Digital Education Office: digital-education@bristol.ac.uk

This problem has now been resolved.

We are aware that in some rooms staff using the Re/Play ‘Record Now’ desktop app to record have received an error message that there was no device found in the room. This issue is being investigated as a matter of urgency, and we are endeavouring to have all Record Now boxes back online as soon as possible. More information will be available as we receive it.

If you rely on Record Now to record your sessions please contact the Digital Education Office so that we can check your set up and manually schedule your session to record automatically, if needed.

Email: digital-education@bristol.ac.uk 

Dear colleagues,

Questionmark Scheduled Maintenance: 16 Oct 2021 09:00-15:00

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 all users may experience service disruptions. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk

We are aware that some students are being retuned to the Blackboard home page when they follow a link to view a RePlay video.

If you know that your students are experiencing this issue, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk with the course id, and a location for the videos in the courses in question (eg, whether they are located in week folders, or found via a RePlay link from the course menu).

We appreciate that this is a crucial time of year for you and your students, and thank you for working with us to restore access to video content to affected students as soon as possible.

For more information, contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.

On Wednesday 8th September at 15.30, the Digital Education Office will be making a change to the Re/Play service to allow for presentations to be added via the text box editor in Blackboard. This piece of work is minor, and there should be no noticeable impact during the work, but please note that the service will be at risk between 15.30 and 16.30 while we make this update.

This will not affect recordings in rooms, but there may be a very short break in service at the start of this time.

If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.

Over the summer we will be working to improve our systems and introduce new features. Blackboard, Re/Play and Teams for Education will all see improvements and new features. Please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk if you have any questions. 

Blackboard 

• Migration onto cloud servers – this will scale the capacity of the system to meet demand, enable us to receive bug fixes and upgrades more quickly, and eliminate the need for any downtime for future upgrades and fixes. 
• Improved text editor – key features include: better copy-and-paste, improved editing from mobile devices, improved accessibility, display computer code snippets, easy text wrapping around images. 
• Reusable comments bank – a new feature will allow individual markers to maintain a bank of reusable comments 

As previously announced, Blackboard will be unavailable from 9pm on Friday 30 July to 9am on Tuesday 3 August while the migration to the cloud server takes place. For further information see our Blackboard developments summer 2021 project page. 

 Re/Play 

• New manual recording app – in our equipped rooms you will now be able to make full use of in-room camera equipment 
• Live streaming – a new service for live streaming from our equipped rooms 
• New Desktop Recorder – we will be introducing a new desktop app called Mosaic 

We have also fixed a security problem relating to embedded content – embedded videos added before 19 July 2021 have been replaced with direct links, and all new embedded content should use the mashup tool. 

For further information see our Re/Play summer improvements page. 

Teams for Education 

Microsoft Teams offers tools for collaboration, discussion, teamwork and community building. These are intended to complement Blackboard. 

• Optional Teams space for each taught unit – Teams spaces will be created automatically, with students and teaching staff, but will be hidden from students buy default 
• Simple integration between Blackboard and Teams – for active Teams, direct links will be added between Teams and the appropriate Blackboard courses 

For further information see our Microsoft Teams for teaching project page.