Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
Turnitin have advised us that there will be scheduled maintenance taking place on Saturday 14th August from 16:00 – 18:00 BST. Turnitin services will be unavailable at this time. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. If you have any questions please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk
You can stay up to date with Turnitin system status by visiting the Turnitin status page.
Blackboard Collaborate has advised us that there will be scheduled maintenance taking place on Thursday, August 12tth, between midnight and 4 am. During this time, users will experience intermittent availability. The purpose of the maintenance is to update Collaborate to version 21.14. You can read about improvements to functionality on the Collaborate Release Notes page.
During the maintenance, you can check Blackboard’s service status page.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused. If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Please check the IT service status page to see how the University’s systems and services are working and for planned maintenance information.
Shortly after the University’s central systems switch over to the new academic year, on August 1, new Blackboard courses will be created for the 2021-22 taught units. These will generally be a copy of the previous year’s course, where that exists, with the summative assessments and Grade Centres cleared ready for the coming year’s assessments. The copies will include the course template structures that were adopted last year by most schools, but the content will need refreshing and resetting for the new academic year. In particular, staff should make sure to remove any of the exam “packages” that were added for the summer assessment period, to avoid confusion.
Students across the University really liked the structure, clarity and consistency provided by the Blackboard course templates, and said how much these helped them with their studying. Carrying this structure forwards, with refreshed content, will help to continue this enhanced student experience of learning.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Mentimeter allows you to create polls, quizzes, word clouds and Q&As to be used in live or asynchronous settings. Polling is anonymous and students can download the app, or complete polls from their browser on a laptop, PC or mobile device.
Mentimeter Pro is now available to University staff. The pro version allows poll results to be downloaded, as well as giving you more colour and layout options, introducing the option of creating and sharing presentation templates, and more. Take a look at our Mentimeter page for information on creating your account, or upgrading your free account. If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
As part of essential work to ensure the security of our systems, the authentication for Re/Play recordings is changing. This security update will break links to videos embedded using the Re/Play embed code in Blackboard courses.
For content added before 19 July
The DEO and IT Services are undertaking remedial action to change existing embedded Re/Play videos into links to ensure that students retain access. This work will take place on 19 July.
For content added after 19 July
See options for adding videos to your course.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
This summer, our Blackboard system will be migrated onto cloud servers. Blackboard will be performing this work, supported by IT Services and the Digital Education Office, between 9 pm on Friday 30 July and 9 am on Tuesday 3 August. Our Blackboard system will therefore be unavailable during this time, and we apologise for any inconvenience this will cause.
The cloud migration will move our Blackboard system from its current location on Blackboard’s servers in Amsterdam onto a ‘cloud’ infrastructure based in Frankfurt, provided by Amazon Web Services. This will allow our system to automatically scale to meet demand and will also enable us to receive bug fixes and upgrades regularly throughout the year, rather than having to wait for the summer upgrade. Consequently, you may occasionally see small changes to Blackboard during the academic year, but the DEO will test these before they go live and provide supporting materials and guidance in advance of any changes. Finally, the migration will also eliminate the need for any scheduled downtime in the future, as upgrades and fixes can be performed without taking our system down.
For further information, please see our project page for Blackboard developments or email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Dear colleagues,
Questionmark Scheduled Maintenance: 17 July 2021 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
As part of this summer’s Blackboard upgrade, a new feature will be available for marking in Blackboard. The Content Library, part of Bb Annotate, allows individual markers to save time by having a bank of reusable comments.
You can keep a master comment bank, use these when marking in any of your Blackboard courses, and edit individual comments once added to assignments, if required.
The Blackboard upgrade will take place between 9 pm on Friday 30 July and 9 am on Tuesday 3 August.
More information about summer 2021 Blackboard developments.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
Teams will be part of our supported digital learning environment in 21/22. Teams offers tools for collaboration, discussion, teamwork and community building and will complement Blackboard. Blackboard remains the appropriate location for teaching materials, reading lists, learning activities, assessment activities and assessment-related information and data.
Through interviews, a short survey,focus group and our new project advisory group DEO and IT Services are establishing requirements for Teams in 21/22 and future years.
For 21/22 the project aims to create Teams:
We are working with an advisory group made of of academic and professional services staff, to prioritise and deliver these requirements for Teaching Block 1, while also collating additional requirements to continue to develop and extend Teams for teaching. Examples of requests for longer-term development include functionality to:
As part of the project we will develop training and support materials for staff and students, as well as case studies and exemplars.
For further information, please see our project page or email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
This summer, for security reasons, there will be an important change to the way Re/Play videos are embedded in Blackboard. If you wish to embed any new video content in Blackboard, please use the Mash-up Tool.
The DEO will also be working with IT Services over the summer to improve Re/Play for the coming academic year. The improvements will include:
– New manual recording app – we are updating the manual recording functionality in our equipped rooms (replacing the old Ad Hoc app), this will allow for full use of in- room camera equipment.
– Enabling live streaming – to support a move to hybrid teaching, we will be enabling a service for live streaming from our equipped rooms.
– Replacement of the Desktop Recorder – the current recorder is no longer supported, so we will be deploying the new recorder, ‘Mosaic’.
– An improved user interface for browsing and selecting recordings – videos will be displayed in Blackboard as screenshot tiles rather than in a list.
Further details and user guides will follow soon. If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.