Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
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
Dear colleagues,
Questionmark Scheduled Maintenance: Saturday 17 December 2022 – 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
This is an update of the issue from 29.11.22
The issue identified yesterday which resulted in a time-out error when accessing Re/Play collections is now resolved. Our supplier confirmed that they had fixed the issue, and currently the system is working as expected.
We will continue to closely monitor the service.
This issue is now resolved. See the updated blog post for the latest information.
We are aware of reports of a timeout error message when trying to access Re/Play from a Blackboard course menu link (eg to the unit collection of recordings). The supplier has identified the issue is related to search based functions, and is working to resolve it as soon as possible. Recordings added or shared by other methods (eg added via the build content tools in Blackboard) are currently unaffected.
We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.
The DEO has identified an issue whereby optional settings chosen during creation of a Turnitin LTI assignment may not be correctly saved. These optional settings include Compare against options, Attach a rubric and the Generate Similarity Reports for student submission dropdown menu.
This has been reported to Turnitin and they are currently investigating the issue.
In the meantime, as a workaround, saving the assignment settings for future use upon assignment creation will ensure that the selected settings are correctly applied. This can be done when creating the submission point by:
Alternatively, instructors may wish to edit the assignment before use to check the settings, in which case any changes made during editing will be applied. To do this instructors will need to:
We apologise for any disruption that this issue may cause. We will provide an update as soon as we have any further information from the supplier.
In the meantime if you have any questions please contact the DEO.
Dear colleagues,
Questionmark Scheduled Maintenance: Saturday 19 November 2022 – 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 a small number of people are getting an error message when they try to access Blackboard, such as “This site can’t be reached”. We are investigating the issue with the assistance of IT Services and Blackboard, and will update this blog when we have further information. In the meantime, anyone who is affected by this may be able to restore access by using the University’s Virtual Private Network (VPN) or the Windows Virtual Desktop.
The issue appears to originate in BT’s nameservers, so only people using BT as their Internet Service Provider should be affected.
Places are available on a new DEO webinar ‘Turnitin Assignments for Administrators’. This will cover how Instructors set up and manage assignment submissions using the new Turnitin LTI assignment. The session will include a demonstration and Q and A. Upcoming dates: 27th October, 1st November and 8th November. Further information and booking (via Develop).