The Blackboard service is now back. There was a 10 minute outage at 3pm resulting form a server problem that affected several services including Blackboard. IT Services apologise for the inconvenience.

We apologise for the current interruption to the Blackboard service. IT Services are working on a resolution now.

The Blackboard service will be unavailable during 8.00am and 8.30am on Monday 30th November. This is due to an essential database memory upgrade to help improve performance. See the IT Services news item.  IT Services apologise for any inconvenience.

 

IT Services have now resolved the Mediasite connection errors that we experienced earlier today. Your courses should now have the Mediasite links back in them and you will be able to see your recorded lectures.  We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused during this interruption in service.

We have been alerted to a problem in Mediasite where the links are not currently appearing in Blackboard – IT Services are working with the vendor to diagnose and fix the problem.  This will not affect scheduled or stored recordings.

We have received a number of reports this week of staff and students receiving emails which appear to have been sent from Blackboard, or University admin services, asking them to provide their log-in details. IT Services have been made aware of this and are looking into the matter. If you receive reports of this from students, please ask them not to provide any information – we never ask for log-in details – and to delete the emails. If you are unsure about the origin of a message, please let us know and we can advise you whether it is genuine or not. If you have any questions, please email TEL-help@bristol.ac.uk

Many apologies for the issues some users experienced over the weekend. Some work IT Services were carrying out inadvertently resulted in users being directed to the Test version of the Blackboard server instead of live. This was noticed and fixed on Saturday afternoon. We are working to assess and correct any consequences.

Places are still available for the “TEL essentials” workshops in November and December.  This course is for teaching staff and aims to provide you with an overview of technology enhanced learning (TEL) and assessment. It provides some principles and strategies underpinning successful use of TEL, focussing particularly on a blended context where students have a mixture of online and face-to-face learning experiences. During the course activities you will also be able to try out a range of technologies.

For further information and booking please see the Staff Development website.

Some staff have been reporting intermittent red errors when adding content to Blackboard.  We have tracked this down to a bug around “http” web links.

On the internet all “http” should be in lower case, however sometimes staff are entering HTTP or Http at the start of their links.  Most systems pick this error up and change the link to “http” all lower case.  If fact Blackboard has always done this in the past.  However there is currently a bug in the code and Blackboard is no longer setting these to lower case.

You can avoid this problem by making sure that if you add a link it starts with “http” in lower case.