After August 1, new Blackboard courses will be created for the 2022-23 taught units. These will be a copy of the previous year’s course, where that exists, including any template.

New units, or units that have had a change of unit code or teaching block, will be generated as a copy of the school’s template, or as blank Blackboard course if your school does not have a template. Please contact the DEO if you are interested in adopting a school template for the 23/24 academic year.

Students are automatically enrolled onto the courses for the programme and units that they are registered to in SITS. Instructor enrolments are copied from the previous year’s course; instructors will need to be manually enrolled onto any new courses. Please contact your school office if you to be added to any new Blackboard courses.

Programme-level courses and organisations are persistent and do not roll over.

Details of the summer work being carried out by the DEO can be found on our Service Improvements page.

Qwickly Attendance has now received an essential system update. This has improved accessibility and replaced the main navigation menu with a new left-hand menu. The settings have also been updated to make the system easier to use. All documentation has now been updated to reflect the changes.

The update we previously announced for Qwickly Course Tools has now been postponed by the supplier and further details will be announced once they are received.

Unlike in previous years, there will be no summer downtime for Blackboard this year. This is because, last summer, we moved our Blackboard system onto a ‘cloud’ infrastructure. This means our system can automatically scale to meet demand, and can also receive bug fixes and upgrades more quickly, without any downtime.

Details of the summer work being carried out by the DEO can be found on our Service Improvements page.

We will be receiving an essential system update for the Qwickly Attendance and Qwickly Course Tools in Blackboard on Wednesday 29 June. 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.

The Campus Pack features in Blackboard have now been switched off, as the product is no longer supported by the supplier. This means it is no longer possible to add new Campus Pack items into courses.

If you already used Campus Pack within an existing course, you will still be able to view the content. Students will also be able to view and export existing items.

For further details on this change and instructions on exporting content, see our Service Improvements page.

When bulk uploading marks and feedback, some users have reported that the processing page appears to never complete. Our testing has shown that, despite this, the upload itself does actually complete and can be accessed via the “Uploaded Packages” page. We therefore recommend that you leave the processing page for slightly longer than the usual upload time before clicking on the ‘Click here’ link to access the “Uploaded Packages” page.

Blackboard has been informed of this issue.

If you find you are experiencing any issues with the bulk upload tool, please contact us at digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.

The Campus Pack features in Blackboard will become unavailable from 24 June, because the tool is no longer being supported by the supplier. Once Campus Pack is unavailable it will not be possible to add new Campus Pack items into courses; Blackboard’s own blogs and wikis can still be used, of course.

If you have a Blackboard course or organisation that already contains Campus Pack features, you will still be able to access these as you can at present. Students will also be able to access them to view old posts unless you choose to make Campus Pack unavailable in your course.

From the summer of 2023, the deprecation of Blackboard building blocks will mean that Campus Pack features will not be accessible at all. If you want to download your own copies of Campus Pack items over the coming year, please follow the directions in our ‘Saving content from Campus Pack‘ guide.

Details of these changes, and the rest of the DEO summer work, can be found on our Service Improvements page.