Digital Education Office blog – Page 79 – Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office

Blackboard course rollover 2016

Posted on July 29, 2016 by Hanrahan Highland

Blackboard course (unit) rollover will take place on 1 August 2016. We recommend that staff do not edit 2015/16 courses after 5 pm on Friday 29 July, as changes made after this time may not be copied into the 2016/17 courses. All 2016/17 courses should be available to staff by 2 August.

Mediasite links will automatically be added to those 2016/17 courses which have Mediasite links in 2015/16 courses. The links will automatically update to the associated 2016/17 catalogue, where the Mediasite recordings are surfaced for students to view, once live.

Turnitin assignments will be copied into 2016/17 courses, but given new start, end, and post dates – so these will need to be changed before making the courses available to students. Note that Turnitin set an expiry date for all assignments in a course that is six months after the course creation date (ie 31 January 2017), after which all Turnitin assignments in the course will become read-only. This expiry date is automatically changed to the latest post date of any Turnitin assignment in the course – so it is worth adjusting the dates as early as possible.

A table showing details of how Blackboard course elements are copied during rollover can be found here.

If you have any questions, please contact tel-help@bristol.ac.uk.

Blackboard Downtime 2am to 10am on Tuesday 9 August 2016

Posted on July 28, 2016 by robynfrith

Unfortunately IT services need to do some additional maintenance on the University database servers on 9 August that will affect access to Blackboard. The extra downtime will take place out of hours as far as possible, from 2am to 10am, to limit inconvenience to users.

TEL and Ed Dev Team

Blackboard rollover

Posted on July 13, 2016July 14, 2016 by Tel Team

All 2016/17 modules will be available in Blackboard by 2 August 2016.
We are not upgrading Blackboard this year and the rollover process
will not necessitate downtime.

Blackboard available again

Posted on June 7, 2016 by Hanrahan Highland

Blackboard is available again, following the planned downtime earlier today.

Blackboard planned downtime: 7 June, 21 July and 4 August

Posted on May 13, 2016July 21, 2016 by Mike Cameron

On 21 July (8:00am to 3:00pm) IT Services will undertake essential maintenance work to the database that supports Blackboard. Blackboard will therefore be unavailable on that day – we apologise for any inconvenience caused. The work is being done to improve the stability of the service.

There will be a further half day of downtime on the morning of Thursday 4 August, for essential updates to Blackboard. We do not anticipate any further planned downtime over the summer.

Mediasite Maintenance Saturday 23rd April

Posted on April 22, 2016October 31, 2018 by digitaleducation

Our service provider will be performing scheduled maintenance on their Mediasite cloud environment on Saturday 23rd April – this is not expected to cause any disruption to service.

The message from Mediasite :

We will be performing planned infrastructure maintenance on Saturday, April
23, 2016 for the Mediasite Cloud environment. This maintenance is expected
to be non-impactful and access to your Mediasite server should not be
affected. The maintenance will be performed between 12:01am and 4:00am CDT.

If any problems are experienced with any IT systems please refer to the IT Services status page for updates.

Blackboard Phishing Scam

Posted on April 21, 2016April 21, 2016 by Mike Cameron

We have been made aware of phishing scams which attempt to point users to fake versions of Blackboard. The links are in emails claiming to be from Blackboard.com. We are not aware of this having happened at the University of Bristol, but please be vigilant.

Please check links are really www.ole.bris.ac.uk . If in doubt go to the service via MyBristol or directly to https://www.ole.bris.ac.uk/.

Problems using the Edge browser with Blackboard

Posted on April 19, 2016 by robynfrith

It has come to our attention that students are experiencing difficulties when uploading submissions to Blackboard when using the Edge browser in Windows 10. Blackboard are aware of the problem and are working on a fix but our current advice is to use another browser (Chrome, IE, or Firefox).

Intermittent service disruption 14 April 2016

Posted on April 14, 2016October 31, 2018 by digitaleducation

The University is currently experiencing some service disruption which is affecting our access to Turnitin. IT services are investigating – please check their service status page.

(update 13.26 pm) Turnitin have Confirmed with Jisc that the Janet network has been experiencing a DDoS which may affect some Turnitinuk users.

Please check the Turnitin Twitter feed for updates.

TEL Team

Launch of Blackboard Student Receipting tool (for assignments)

Posted on April 12, 2016April 14, 2016 by Mike Cameron

On the 18th April at 9.00 am we will launch the “advanced receipting” feature for students submitting Blackboard assignments.* We will be monitoring the tool after launch. Please contact tel-help@bristol.ac.uk if you experience any issues.

Following an assignment submission, students will receive an email confirmation. This receipt includes details on who submitted the work, the time of submission, the module title, the assignment title, and the name and size of the submitted file, as well as a link to our Help page.

Students who submit an assignment after 9.00 am on the 18th April will receive the receipt. Those who submit before this time will not receive a receipt.

*Students submitting an assignment to Turnitin through Blackboard already receive a receipt.

A copy of the email receipt is stored within Blackboard. (Instructions on how to access these receipts. A screenshot of an example receipt is shown below.