Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
It has been reported that staff may be experiencing issues with slowness when opening Similarity Reports in Turnitin, and receiving errors when attempting to grade or add feedback.
Students making submissions are not affected by this issue.
Turnitin UK 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
This is a reminder that Turnitin services will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance by the supplier from Saturday 14th January 2023 at 17:00 until Sunday 15th January 2023 at 01:00 GMT. During this maintenance window users will be unable to submit or mark papers, or view marks, feedback and similarity reports.
Further information is available on the Turnitin status page.
Before exams, coursework or timed assessments are marked, schools should please ensure that Blackboard Grade Centre columns are hidden from students until marks and feedback are ready to be released. To prevent students from seeing marks too early, you should also ensure Total and Weighted Total columns are hidden. Check a column header for a circle with a red line through it which indicates the column is hidden from students.
If it is not hidden, and you need to hide it, click the down arrow next to the column header and select Hide from students (on/off).
If this option isn’t available, or if the column has a green tick next to it, you will need to hide it in a different way:
For more information on administering Electronic Management of Assessment workflows, please see our EMA guidance page.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Dear colleagues,
Questionmark Scheduled Maintenance: Saturday 23 January 2023 – 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
Qwickly Course Tools is currently experiencing an issue which is preventing users from updating course availability and from posting announcements for multiple courses at once. The issue has been reported to Qwickly and we are working on a solution.
Note that it is still possible to change course availability and to post announcements in individual courses using the standard methods within Blackboard.
There have been occasional and intermittent errors reported by users when attempting to access PowerPoint files submitted to Turnitin. Affected files cannot be opened within Turnitin and students may not get a digital receipt.
The error typically reads:
The Digital Education Office has reported this issue to Turnitin, who are investigating. Currently, they believe it to be related to certain uses of images in PowerPoint, including PowerPoint templates and animations.
The issue can be avoided if students save PowerPoints as PDFs for submission. Students can save work created in PowerPoint as a PDF by selecting “Save As” and changing the file type to PDF.
If you require further guidance, or have any other queries, please contact the Digital Education Office.
Occasionally users may find equations do not display correctly in Blackboard. If this occurs you should clear your browser cache, then refresh/reload Blackboard. Clearing the cache can also be done in advance as a preventative measure once you have logged into Blackboard eg if students are taking a test which includes equations
Firefox is unaffected by these occasional equation display issues.
Instructions for other browsers on how to clear the cache should be available from the Help section on the browser menu, or its online support pages.
Apologies for any inconvenience. The DEO is continuing to work with Blackboard on a permanent fix.
The University will be closed from Friday 23rd December, re-opening on Wednesday 4th January 2023. Digital Education Office staff will respond to queries as soon as possible when we return. Information is available for staff and students on IT support over the winter closure period.
We hope you have a restful Christmas break.
Digital Education Office team
Turnitin have informed us that their services will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance from Saturday 14th January 2023 at 17:00 until Sunday 15th January 2023 at 01:00 GMT. During this maintenance window users will be unable to submit or mark papers, or view marks, feedback and similarity reports.
Further information is available on the Turnitin status page.
Staff using a Blackboard marking workflow who require Turnitin similarity reports can batch download assignments from Blackboard and batch upload them to Turnitin. Since the move to the Turnitin LTI integration this functionality (zip file upload) is only available to Instructors via the Turnitin website (please contact DEO if you require instructions).
Batch upload via the Turnitin website should not be used if marking is to be done using Turnitin. Papers uploaded in this way will not sync with the Blackboard Grade Centre.
If marking with Turnitin is required papers must be submitted via Blackboard.
If you have any queries please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk