Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
We are pleased to announce that the transition to the Turnitin LTI integration with Blackboard has been successfully completed.
As per previous communications, this brings a number of improvements and changes. Please see the Turnitin Transition projects page for more information.
Qwickly Course Tools, in Blackboard, has now received an essential system update. This tool allows users to make changes to multiple courses, such as:
The update has improved accessibility and replaced the main navigation with a new left-hand menu. The link to Qwickly Course Tools will appear differently on Blackboard’s home page:
Our documentation has been updated to reflect the changes.
If you have any questions, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
As part of the ongoing work by the Digital Education Office to improve the Re/Play service, the methods you use to add Re/Play content to Blackboard are changing.
We will be decommissioning some of the methods staff may be familiar with, and have added a new method which improves usability and the search function. We have updated our guidance to show the new method. Content added in other ways and content from previous years will still work. This work will be completed by mid-September and we will post updates to this blog as the work progresses.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
The Digital Education Office (DEO) will be piloting a new tool to support the development of student digital capabilities in 22/23. The Jisc Digital discovery tool provides students with opportunities to reflect on skills, identify areas for improvement and be directed to the support and help they need for their time studying, as well as with any future life or career endeavours. As an institution, the tool will enable us to map existing support for digital capabilities and discover gaps in our provision. This project will be led by the Student Digital Learning Experience team within the DEO.
Students can keep up to date with the project by subscribing to our student-facing DigiTalk blog. The Student Digital learning Experience team are also developing resources, such as our Digitally Skilled video series, which are based on the Jisc digital capability framework, and can be found on our Student Support Learning Online page.
If you have any questions, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
As a reminder, the University will be switching to a new Turnitin integration with Blackboard, called Turnitin LTI, from the 1st September 2022.
Similarity reports and the Feedback Studio used for marks and feedback will remain the same but some other aspects will be changing. Improvements include an enhanced interface, an analytics dashboard and the ability to distribute anonymous marking using a single submission point. Other differences include a slight change to the way Instructors set up and access new LTI Turnitin assignments and downloadable onscreen digital receipts for students rather than emails.
For more information, please see the Turnitin Transition projects page.
The essential system update to Qwickly Course Tools in Blackboard will now be taking place on Wednesday 31 August.
The update will improve accessibility and replace the main navigation menu with a new left-hand menu to make the system easier for instructors to use. The Qwickly settings have also been reconfigured to further simplify use. Details of the changes can be found on our Service Improvements page. Qwickly will remain available to staff throughout the update.
Some students may have lost access to Blackboard between 9 pm and 11 pm on Monday evening, due to central student records incorrectly showing these students as having left the University. At 11 pm, IT Services re-enabled the student enrolments manually and have temporarily disabled updating Blackboard from central student records while the root cause of the issue is being investigated. We apologise to any students who may have been affected.
Update: Our recent testing shows ZIP file submissions are now working as normal, however the supplier is still investigating.
Turnitin ZIP file submissions are currently unavailable. During this time, staff may find they are unable to upload ZIP files to Turnitin and instead receive an error message. Turnitin have been informed and are working on a resolution. In the meantime, our testing has shown the Multiple File Upload and Single File Upload options appear to be working correctly, so files which need to be uploaded urgently can be done so through those methods.
If you have any questions, please contact the Digital Education Office.
We are pleased to announce that Xerte has successfully been upgraded to version 3.11 and is available to staff and students.
The summer Blackboard “rollover” process creates a copy of a previous year’s unit course (where one exists) for the new academic year, with all the teaching materials and files. (If your school is introducing a new or refreshed Blackboard template, though, this may not be the case.)
Preparing your new Blackboard course is a great opportunity for you to refresh it by removing duplicate or obsolete content and implementing students’ feedback, to enhance their experience and their effective use of the digital learning environment.
Read the Guidance for staff on refreshing Blackboard courses for more information, or contact the DEO at digital-education@bristol.ac.uk .