Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
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
The Blackboard upgrade on Wednesday July 5 is moving to slightly later in the afternoon. We will be carrying out the upgrade starting at 3.45 pm, with a projected finish time of 6 pm. All other details remain unchanged. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.
If you have any questions, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
In Mentimeter, a ‘Shared Presentations’ feature has appeared on the left-hand side toolbar as part of a recent update, as well as an option on the menu in each presentation called ‘Move to Shared Presentations’. We are advising you not to use this feature, as it shares both the presentation and results with everyone within the University. We are aware that this is not suitable for University use and are therefore discussing disabling this feature with the software provider.
If you have already moved your presentation to this new area, it’s very easy to move back:
If you would like to share your presentation to collaborate with another member of staff, you can do this in the way you are used to, from the ‘My Presentations’ section:
Or
Please note that Groups are only for sharing templates.
If you have any questions, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Each year, the Digital Education Office delivers a summer plan of work on our digital education environments and systems. This plan includes any significant system changes or software upgrades, but also includes more minor changes to systems and processes, ensuring everything works well for the next academic year.
We regularly update the Service Improvements Page over the summer, documenting and advertising expected and completed work. If you are interested in keeping up to date, it is worth bookmarking this page. Any major changes will also be announced via other channels, such as this blog.
This year, many of these improvements have been prompted by outputs from the ongoing Digital Learning Environment (DLE) Review. Staff, students and professional services colleagues have been asked to share their experiences of using the digital education environment, as well as work with us to imagine the teaching and learning of the future. To find out more about the DLE review, please visit the DLE SharePoint page for staff.
On July 5, we’re updating Blackboard to use the new Ultra Base Navigation. This update will give Blackboard a modern look and feel and provide easier access to important information.
Ultra Base Navigation has a modern, intuitive navigation menu that sits outside of courses and is always available.
Your courses will not change. They will look and operate exactly as they do now.
The benefits of Ultra Base Navigation include:
To enable Ultra Base Navigation, Blackboard will be unavailable for a short time on the afternoon of July 5, between 3.45 pm and 6pm. After this, you will see a redesigned login page for Blackboard and can use the new navigation as soon as you log in.
You can find more information, with screenshots, on the project webpage: Blackboard Ultra Base Navigation. If you have any questions, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
It has been reported that staff may be experiencing intermittent issues with slowness when opening the Feedback Studio in Turnitin, and receiving errors when attempting to grade or add feedback.
Students making submissions are not affected by this issue.
Turnitin UK is aware of the issue and is currently working to bring the service back to optimum health. We will update this blog with any further developments.
If you have any concerns or questions, please contact us by emailing digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Guidance is available for providing live captions in PowerPoint. By enabling this feature, the spoken content of your presentation is temporarily captioned and displayed on students’ personal devices, which can be viewed in their preferred language. This not only helps students understand lecture content more effectively but assists them in retaining information and actively participating in discussions.
While live captions in PowerPoint can greatly benefit students with English as an additional language, it is important to note that students with disabilities may have separate requirements. If you have a student who has expressed a need for live captions due to a disability, please ask them to contact Disability Services.
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
Full transcripts of Re/Play presentations are now available for staff to download. These text files can be downloaded by selecting Download to Computer in a presentation when viewing it in My Re/Play. Transcripts can be accessed by either the presentation owner or anyone with editor or moderator rights.
You may now notice a tag appearing for some presentations, which says ‘edited captions’. A team of Student Caption Editors have been working in the DEO to correct automatic speech recognition errors in some Re/Play presentations.
If you, or someone else in your school, is editing captions, you can now also add the ‘edited captions’ tag in the Information tab in My Re/Play. These tags will be visible to both students and staff in Re/Play collections, and help students to recognise which captions are likely to be more accurate. Ideally, all captions should be checked for key terminology and usability.
If you teach as part of your role at the University, we need to hear from you!
This year, we are participating in the digital experience insights survey for Higher Education teaching staff, created by Jisc to better understand the way that digital tools and practices are used across the UK HE Sector. Jisc is the UK digital, data and technology agency focused on tertiary education, research and innovation. Some of the questions will feed into a national benchmarking exercise run by Jisc; the results of previous surveys can be found from their webpages.
The Digital Education Office, alongside the Digital Learning Environment Review project team, will also be using the survey results to add important data to our review work, as well as identify those areas which are the highest priority for you.
The survey shouldn’t take longer than 10-15 minutes to complete, and is anonymous.
The survey will close on the 15th June.
