IT Services are making some technical changes to the systems that handle student marks. As a result of this, the ability to transfer marks from Blackboard to SITS/eVision will be unavailable on Wednesday 17 November between 10 am and 11 am. 17 November should be considered an “at risk” day, and we recommend that you do not transfer any marks on this day. If you were planning on transferring marks out of Blackboard on 17 November, or shortly afterwards, please let the Digital Education Office know by emailing digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Desktop Recorderis no longer technically supportedby our supplier, and no longer functions with our systems as it isn’t compatible with the newest version of our Re/Play software. It is now being retired, and we recommend switching to Mosaic as soon as you can.
What is the new screen recording tool, Mosaic?
This summer, we introduced the new tool Mosaic screen capture, which you can use to record anything you can see on your screen, alongside audio and, if chosen, video from a webcam. It’s a very easy-to-use software with essentially just three buttons, to choose your inputs – microphone, webcam and which window or display to capture. If you choose a window and a webcam, both will appear side by side in the video.
Mosaic then automatically uploads your videos to your My Re/Play area. Log into Blackboard and click on the My Re/Play link as usual. Once in My Re/Play, you can edit the videos, add captions and set the permissions of your recordings.
There are of course also many alternatives for creating pre-recorded videos, including narrated PowerPoint presentations or using Camtasia for anything more complex.
Mosaic is available for Windows 10 and Mac OSX 7.4 and newer. Follow this link to install Mosaic and register it to get started. Note that you should use this link in your web browser and not from within the My/Replay area in Blackboard, for the best experience.
If you have an older version of macOS, or have trouble downloading the software, get in touch with us at digital-education@bristol.ac.uk and we’ll help you find a solution.
Use Mosaic to automatically import video files to Re/Play
As Mosaic is connected to My Re/Play, you can also use it to automatically import any video files from your computer to your Re/Play – for example, recordings made in other tools like Teams or Zoom. To do this, you set up what’s called a ‘watch folder’, which Mosaic ‘watches’ for new content to add to Re/Play.
Find out how to set up a watch folder for Windows and for Mac OS.
This has now been resolved – please see the update blog post for more details.
We have been informed of a bug affecting group submissions to Blackboard assignments. This does not affect individual Blackboard assignments or Turnitin assignments.
Update 10/11/21: This issue appears to be intermittent so may not affect all assignment submissions.
When a student submits to a group assignment, the bug means that they may be presented with an error message: ‘Failed to submit Assignment. Please try again.’ Additionally, the submission may not generate any receipt so students will not receive a confirmation email. Despite this, the submission will be successful.
We have reported and further escalated the issue with Blackboard, and they are working on a fix as a matter of priority.
We also wanted to reassure students that their submissions have been made, despite the error message and lack of receipt. Students can check if their submission has been successful as follows:
Submit as usual.
If you encounter a red banner saying ‘Failed to submit Assignment. Please try again.’ use the left-hand menu to return to the Assessment, Submission and Feedback area.
Locate the assignment submission point as before and click on it.
You should be presented with a review page displaying the work you submitted.
We recommend you take a screenshot of this page for your own records. Be sure to include the submission date and time (under ‘ATTEMPT’ on the right-hand side) in the screenshot.
We apologise for the inconvenience and will blog again as soon as we hear anything further from Blackboard. If you have any concerns or questions, please get in contact with us: digital-education@bristol.ac.uk
We are aware that in some rooms staff using the Re/Play ‘Record Now’ desktop app to record have received an error message that there was no device found in the room. This issue is being investigated as a matter of urgency, and we are endeavouring to have all Record Now boxes back online as soon as possible. More information will be available as we receive it.
If you rely on Record Now to record your sessions please contact the Digital Education Office so that we can check your set up and manually schedule your session to record automatically, if needed.
As coursework submissions start, 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:
Click the dropdown arrow next to the column name.
Click Edit Column Information.
Scroll to the bottom and set Show this column to students to No.
Click Submit.
For Turnitin users, please be aware that a persistent bug means you must make the submission point unavailable after making any changes to the settings. For more details, please see our previous blog post on Turnitin submission point availability issues.
For more information on administering Electronic Management of Assessment workflows, please see our EMA guidance page.
Blackboard have advised us that there will be scheduled Blackboard Collaborate maintenance taking place on Thursday, October 14th, between midnight and 4 am. During this time, users will experience intermittent availability. The purpose of the maintenance is to update Collaborate to version v21.18. You can read about improvements to functionality and features on the Collaborate Release Notes page.
We are aware that some students are being retuned to the Blackboard home page when they follow a link to view a RePlay video.
If you know that your students are experiencing this issue, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk with the course id, and a location for the videos in the courses in question (eg, whether they are located in week folders, or found via a RePlay link from the course menu).
We appreciate that this is a crucial time of year for you and your students, and thank you for working with us to restore access to video content to affected students as soon as possible.
For more information, contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
There are two recommended ways of adding Re/Play videos to your Blackboard course. Both ensure that the videos are only made available to users within the relevant Blackboard unit spaces. Which you choose will depend on how you want the video to appear to students:
Add it as a standalone item. This shows the video as an individual Blackboard item in a small player.
Insert a link and thumbnail image. This allows additional text to be added around the video to contextualise it. The student clicks on the link to open the video.
A third option – embedding a video player within a Blackboard item – is available, but not recommended, as it means the video would be viewable by anyone within or outside the University if shared.
If you wish to use the third option, embedding a video within a Blackboard item, the ‘Who Can View’ permission for the video in ‘My Re/Play’ must be set to ‘Everyone’. This means that the video can be shared with anyone within or beyond the University who has access to the link. To set this permission:
Locate the presentation you wish to set permissions on
Click on the padlock symbol to unlock it
Click on the video
On the right-hand side, in the ‘Who can view’ section, adjust the slider to ‘Everyone’
If you embed a video in this way but don’t set the permission to ‘Everyone’, then students will be asked to authenticate by Mediasite (as shown in the screenshot below), but will still not be able to access the video.
