Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
Questionmark have advised us that there will be scheduled maintenance taking place on Saturday 19th September from 08:00 – 20:00 BST.
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.
Turnitin users may have experienced issues with its service on Sunday 30th August. This was due to an issue with a third party network party provider. All services have now returned to normal.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
School / faculty administrators or Student Administration Managers (SAMs) are busy setting up reassessments. This is a reminder that videos covering the process are available from BEAM:
https://uob.sharepoint.com/sites/beam/SitePages/reassessment-training.aspx
User Guides and Reference Guides:
https://uob.sharepoint.com/sites/beam/SitePages/manage-reassessment.aspx
We have a new FAQ:
How do I make my reassessment available on a specific date?
Go to the submission point, select Edit and then add the dates and times in the in the ‘Availability’ section under ‘Display After’ and ‘Display Until’ .
Please ensure you have also watched Video 6 on how to allocate reassessment groups and make your assessment visible to students.
Please read this information if you use or administer Turnitin for anonymous marking.
With the recent Blackboard upgrade, essential to ensure our Blackboard service remains supported, we were also required to update the Turnitin integration. Unfortunately, in the newer version Turnitin have changed the Sync Grades functionality so it cannot be used to send submission information (marks or submission status) from Turnitin to the Blackboard Grade Centre while anonymity is on.
Does this affect me?
The change affects you if you have previously used Sync Grades to:
If you are affected please read the information about alternatives to sync grades before setting up any new Turnitin assignments. If in doubt contact the Digital Education Office for further advice.
The annual “rollover” of Blackboard courses into their 2020 versions is now complete, and staff can access the courses. As always, staff are not automatically added to courses for units that are new this year – please contact your school office to be added to a new course.
This year, many schools have adopted a new Blackboard course template, in preparation for blended teaching and learning in 2020-21. Guidance on how to make use of these templates can be found in the Blackboard courses themselves – there is a “Help for staff” area in each course created from a template. If you have any questions about the adoption of these templates, please consult your school in the first instance.
The Digital Design self-study course is an introduction to designing for online and highly-blended learning. You can dip in to particular sections or work through the whole course, which includes demos and tips on how to use a range of different technologies. Find out more and enrol on the Digital Design booking page.
The Blackboard upgrade has been completed, and Blackboard is available again now. Please accept our apologies for the delay in completing the upgrade. We have tested all key functionality, and are continuing with further in-depth testing.
If you come across anything that isn’t behaving as you expect it to, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.
The Blackboard upgrade has taken longer than anticipated, and consequently the Blackboard downtime has been extended to 1 pm today. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience this causes.
This is a final reminder that the Digital Education Office will be upgrading Blackboard from 5 pm today, Wednesday 5th August 2020. Blackboard will be unavailable until midday on Thursday 6th August.
This update is part of essential service maintenance. The core Blackboard functionality and interface will remain the same, but the upgrade will allow us to explore integration with Microsoft Office 365.
Bb Annotate is a new tool in Blackboard for feedback annotations. It will replace the current tool, Box View, from 10th August 2020, and has a much wider range of functionality. The change to Bb Annotate will not require downtime, and it will work immediately for new submissions. Previously submitted assignments and feedback will be converted in the background, or when first accessed after the switch. This change does not affect Turnitin assignments. For more information see Bb Annotate – new Blackboard inline marking tool.