Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 20 January 2024 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.
Turnitin has added an option in the assignment inbox which allows users to Resync grade from the three-dots menu under Options. Users can select this option when a grade from the inbox does not appear in the Grade Centre. Choosing this option will re-send the grade to the Grade Centre.
If you have any queries about using this feature, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
In a prior blog post, we announced that Blackboard was deprecating support for the Receipting Building Block, which we use to customise the receipts students receive when submitting work to a Blackboard Assignment. This would have resulted in changes to the email receipt that students receive after submission.
Following further discussions with Blackboard, we are pleased to announce that these changes will no longer be implemented, meaning that:
The default wording on student receipts will continue to be:
Your submission has been received. We have recorded the following details:
Submission ID: ID NUMBER
User: STUDENT NAME
Student ID: STUDENT NUMBER
Assignment: NAME OF SUBMITTED DOCUMENT(S)
Course: NAME OF COURSE
Date of Submission: SUBMISSION DATE AND TIME
This submission contained the following attached files:
LINK TO FILES AND SIZE OF FILES
Please retain this email receipt. Do not reply to this email. If you have any queries about your submission, please contact your school.
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
Blackboard has a scheduled Amazon Web Services maintenance window on Tuesday, 12 December, starting at 1 am GMT, with a duration of 1 hour. During this window, there is a possibility the Blackboard home page may be unavailable and users may see a “503 Service Temporary Unavailable” error message.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Blackboard is deprecating support for the Receipting Building Block, which we use to customise the receipt students receive when submitting work to a Blackboard Assignment, at the end of 2023. This will lead to two changes in the submission receipts that are important to note.
For students
For administration staff
The default wording from 2024 will be:
Your submission has been received and we have recorded the following details.
[These include Confirmation ID, Course Title, Course ID, Assignment Name, Date and Time of Submission, File name(s) and size(s).]
Please retain this receipt. If you have any queries about your submission, please contact your school.
Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 16 December 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.
We are pleased to announce that the Eesysoft/Impact course reports have now been updated and are available to use.
You can access course reports for a Blackboard course by going to the ‘Course Tools’ menu within the course and selecting ‘Impact course reports 1.3’.
Further details on course reports can be found in our guide to ‘Checking and improving student engagement‘.
We have been notified by Turnitin that Similarity Reports are not downloading correctly at this time. Attempts to download Similarity Reports are producing an error that reads, “Could not process your request”. This occurs in both the Feedback studio accessible through Blackboard and on the Turnitin website interface. Unfortunately, this means there is no way to download Similarity Reports at this time.
This incident was resolved by Turnitin on 23/11/23, returning normal functionality to the downloading of Similarity Reports.
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.