Changes to Blackboard Submission Receipts will not be Implemented

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In a prior blog post, we announced that Blackboard was deprecating support for the Receipting Building Block, which we use to customise the receipts students receive when submitting work to a Blackboard Assignment. This would have resulted in changes to the email receipt that students receive after submission.

Following further discussions with Blackboard, we are pleased to announce that these changes will no longer be implemented, meaning that: 

  • Students: will continue to receive a detailed email receipt including a link that they can use to download a copy of their submitted document(s).  
  • Administration Staff:  will continue to be able to review submission receipts stored for within the content system of a given course. 

The default wording on student receipts will continue to be: 

Your submission has been received. We have recorded the following details: 

Submission ID: ID NUMBER 

User: STUDENT NAME 

Student ID: STUDENT NUMBER 

Assignment: NAME OF SUBMITTED DOCUMENT(S) 

Course: NAME OF COURSE 

Date of Submission: SUBMISSION DATE AND TIME 

This submission contained the following attached files: 

LINK TO FILES AND SIZE OF FILES 

Please retain this email receipt. Do not reply to this email. If you have any queries about your submission, please contact your school. 

 

 

Updates to Mentimeter

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As we conclude 2023, we wanted to do a quick round-up of our Mentimeter news from the year. We’d also like to remind staff that we have a campus-wide license for Mentimeter, which anyone can sign up to.

This year we have seen our biggest surge of users on Menti, jumping to just under 2000 on our campus-wide license, and another 1000 still using their free accounts. We’ve had some great feedback from staff and students on their use of Menti and are looking forward to hearing about more best-practice examples in 2024.  

Below we have noted down some Menti news and new features that we thought users may find useful. As ever, if you have any questions about using Mentimeter, please contact the Digital Education Office. 

Menti Academy 

Mentimeter have developed a series of online self-paced courses for users to complete as part of their continued professional development (CPD). You can improve your presentation skills while at the same time learn more about using Mentimeter in your teaching and training. We have added a number of these courses to the Develop website so you can keep all your CPD in one place.  

Menti app in MS Teams  

You can now share your Mentimeter presentations directly in a Teams meeting without having to switch to a browser. Participants can also interact with your presentation in the meeting window, instead of having to go to Menti.com and enter a code. 

Image taken from mentimeter.com

 

More information about adding the app to Teams, presenting and participating can be found on this ‘Mentimeter for Microsoft Teams’ page. 

New functionality in Mentimeter

Gifs 

You can now add gifs to your presentations as well as images. This is a great add on to graphs and makes results look fun and engaging. Users can learn more about how to do this by going to this Mentimeter website page. 

Segmentation analysis

If your presentation contains several multiple-choice questions, you can use the segmentation function to display results grouped by how participants answered a previous question. Segmentation of results can be useful for spotting trends in responses. 

More information about using the segmentation functions can be found on this ‘Segmentation of votes’ page. 

Image showing how segmentation works in Mentimeter

Image taken from mentimeter.com

Participants voting on open–ended questions

You can now allow participants to vote on responses given to open-ended questions. Participants can post their responses as usual, then they can vote on each other’s submissions.  

More information about enabling the voting function can be found on this ‘Open ended questions’ page.

Mentimeter – campus wide licence 

You can easily move your free account over to our campus wide licence by going to our website page. Please ensure your UoB email matches your Mentimeter email exactly before you upgrade. You can change your email in Menti by going to the profile icon in the top right of the Mentimeter home page and clicking on Settings. 

If you have any further queries about using Mentimeter, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk 

 

Blackboard maintenance, 12 December, 1 am – 2 am

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Blackboard has a scheduled Amazon Web Services maintenance window on Tuesday, 12 December, starting at 1 am GMT, with a duration of 1 hour. During this window, there is a possibility the Blackboard home page may be unavailable and users may see a “503 Service Temporary Unavailable” error message.

If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.

Changes to Blackboard Submission Receipts

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Blackboard is deprecating support for the Receipting Building Block, which we use to customise the receipt students receive when submitting work to a Blackboard Assignment, at the end of 2023. This will lead to two changes in the submission receipts that are important to note.

For students

  • Currently, the email receipt includes a link that students can use to download a copy of their submitted document(s).
  • From 2024, this link will not exist, and students will only be able to download a copy of their submitted document(s) if the submission point is available to them.

For administration staff

  • Currently, submission receipts are stored for review within the content system of a given course.
  • From 2024, submission receipts will be stored within the Grade Centre’s “Reports” function.

The default wording from 2024 will be:

Your submission has been received and we have recorded the following details.
[These include Confirmation ID, Course Title, Course ID, Assignment Name, Date and Time of Submission, File name(s) and size(s).]
Please retain this receipt. If you have any queries about your submission, please contact your school.

Questionmark OnDemand Scheduled Maintenance, Saturday 16 December 2023 09.00-15.00

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Questionmark will be carrying out scheduled maintenance on Saturday 16 December 2023 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.

Eesysoft/Impact course reports updated

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We are pleased to announce that the Eesysoft/Impact course reports have now been updated and are available to use.

You can access course reports for a Blackboard course by going to the ‘Course Tools’ menu within the course and selecting ‘Impact course reports 1.3’.

 

 

 

Further details on course reports can be found in our guide to ‘Checking and improving student engagement‘.

[Resolved] Turnitin Service Incident: Feedback Studio not allowing download of Similarity Reports

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We have been notified by Turnitin that Similarity Reports are not downloading correctly at this time. Attempts to download Similarity Reports are producing an error that reads, “Could not process your request”. This occurs in both the Feedback studio accessible through Blackboard and on the Turnitin website interface. Unfortunately, this means there is no way to download Similarity Reports at this time.

This incident was resolved by Turnitin on 23/11/23, returning normal functionality to the downloading of Similarity Reports.

Submit your teaching software requests for Teaching Block 2 (TB2) to IT Services by Tomorrow (Friday 24th November)

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The final opportunity to submit your teaching software requests to IT Services for TB2 is this Friday, 24 November. If you have already been using specific software in Teaching Block 1 and wish to continue using it in Teaching Block 2, there is no need to resubmit a request for those software applications.  

See more information and access the app on the IT Services Teaching and Student Software SharePoint page. Please also complete the feedback form to help IT Services improve the Teaching Software Request App for the 2024/25 academic year. Any additional inquiries should be directed toward IT Services.

Upcoming Eesysoft/Impact update

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On Monday 27 November there will be an update coming to the way that we access ‘EesySoft course reports’.  This is due to changes made by the supplier that have temporarily caused loss of the function.

Once the update occurs, you will be able to access course reports for a Blackboard course by going to the ‘Course Tools’ menu within the course and selecting ‘Impact course reports 1.3’.

 

 

 

Further details on course reports can be found in our guide to ‘Checking and improving student engagement‘.

We apologise for any inconvenience that you are currently experiencing.

 

New feature in Turnitin: Assignment Copy

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Turnitin has introduced a new feature called Assignment Copy, which allows instructors to copy assignment setups for re-use.

This feature streamlines the workflow for staff in several ways; for instance, you can:

  • Copy assignment setups from previous years’ courses into brand new courses for the upcoming academic year, with updated dates
  • Create a new set of assignments and then copy those assignment setups into multiple different courses, using the same assignment dates
  • Create one assignment setup as a template and then copy that assignment setup multiple times within a course.

This feature is not limited to instructors who created the original assignment. Any instructors who were associated with the assignment will be able to use it for copying. Please note that staff enrolled in a very large number of courses (over 1200) might experience a slight delay when accessing assignments to copy.

Instructions on how to use Assignment Copy can be found on Turnitin’s website. If you have any queries about using this feature, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.