Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
On Saturday 29 March, between 15:00 – 15:30 GMT, Turnitin will be performing maintenance on their system. During this small window of time, Turnitin will be unavailable.
You can stay up to date with the Turnitin system status on the Turnitin status page. We apologise for any inconvenience.
Blackboard is currently investigating an intermittent document rendering issue affecting the Annotate tool. Instructors using Blackboard assignments and attempting to annotate papers via the online interface may be affected.
The supplier is actively working to restore the service to optimal performance, and we are closely monitoring the situation. We will provide updates as we have them.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 15 March 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
Please note that, if a Blackboard course has both Blackboard assignments with Turnitin enabled and Turnitin LTI submission points in it, and a student submits similar work to both, the similarity scores for the later submission may be higher, due to it matching the earlier one. This can occur when, for example, a student’s summative submission is based on their previous formative submission. The supplier is aware of this issue and is currently working on a fix.
You can avoid this issue by ensuring that, within one course, you either use Turnitin LTI submission points or Ultra assignments with Turnitin enabled, but not both.
If you have experienced this issue and need assistance updating the similarity reports, please get in contact with us by emailing us at digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Please note that Blackboard Ultra assignments with Turnitin enabled do not have an interface to for managing permanent deletions from Turnitin’s Paper Repository. This means that, currently, every permanent deletion request needs to be referred to Turnitin, and may take several days to process. (This is not the case for standalone Turnitin LTI assignments, where paper deletions can be managed from within the Turnitin interface.)
The same applies to restoring any papers deleted in error – these will also require referral to Turnitin, and require additional time to process.
If you need help on how to deal with paper deletions, please get in contact with us by emailing us at digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Re/Play now includes interactive elements to enhance your presentations. With these new features, you can add text, buttons, and hotspots directly onto your videos, helping to guide your students and link to additional content seamlessly.
Getting Started
Open your presentation and click Edit Interactions. This brings up an editor, with a grid to help you accurately place and customise your interactive elements. All elements can be repositioned. For text and hotspots, you can also resize them—hold the Shift key to move without resizing.
Types of Interactions
Best Practices
We hope you enjoy experimenting with these new tools to create more engaging and interactive learning experiences. You can find more information on our Re/Play support pages. If you have any questions or need further support, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 15 February 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 issue with some assignment submission email receipts not being received was resolved on January 17, and is no longer occurring. Please accept our apologies for not providing a separate update sooner.
We have identified an issue with our Blackboard receipting tool, which is currently not always sending out email receipts to students after they have submitted their work. However, the receipts are always being stored in Blackboard.
As a temporary measure, we advise students to check the “Submitted” section of “My Marks” after submitting their work. If a receipt is not recorded there, they should attempt to submit their work again and then contact their school if the issue persists. However, if a receipt is present, they should take a screenshot, note the time, and be assured that their work has been successfully submitted.
We are prioritising this matter and have raised it with Blackboard as an urgent issue. We will provide updates as soon as the issue has been resolved.
UPDATE: Issue has been resolved. We are investigating the cause with Blackboard. Students making submissions should now receive receipts via email. Students who submitted work between Wednesday 15 Jan and Friday 17 Jan should still check receipts as described above. Please report any new instances of issues receiving receipts to digital-education@bristol.ac.uk
On , 14 January 2025, the supplier resolved the problem causing issues with managing content in Re/Play
Students were not affected by this issue and were able to playback recordings in their Blackboard Courses. The incident did not impact the recording and uploading of lectures recorded in our equipped spaces.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.