IT Services have informed us that they are intending to take down the server that hosts Blackboard (and other services, such as SITS) on Thursday evening for two hours, between 5.30 pm and 7.30 pm. This is to allow them to make important repairs to the hardware. Hopefully this downtime will not have a significant impact, but please contact us if you think it is going to cause any problems for you or your students. We will pass on updates as we receive them.
Blackboard workshops for staff
Places are available on Blackboard workshops for staff. These include:
- Introduction to Blackboard for administrative and support staff
- Introduction to Blackboard for Academic Staff (including Research Staff)
- Effective course design
For further information and booking please see the “Training and events” section of the TEL website.
Questionmark Perception maintenance 24th September 2014
The Questionmark Perception system will be unavailable on Wednesday 24th September 2014. The downtime is required for maintenance.
Thursday 25th will be an “at risk” period – we strongly recommend that you do not run any critical activities on this day. Please let us know (tel-help@bristol.ac.uk) if you have any critical activity that must run on this day.
Campus Pack update – Summer 2014
Campus Pack have updated their wiki, podcast, blog and journal course tools in Blackboard, as well as the Personal Learning Space.
Information on what is new can be found on the Campus Pack website .
We would recommend that these tools are accessed via Chrome as there have been reports of some problems for Internet Explorer users.
Questionmark Perception Groups
Dear colleagues ,
This email is for Questionmark Perception administrators and anyone who manages student accounts and groups using Enterprise Manager.
For this coming academic year, we recommend that you use your existing group (s) where possible. If this is not possible, please email tel-help@bristol.ac.uk with the name of the new group along with the names of any colleagues who need access to this group, and we will create it for you.
Renaming or editing groups is not recommended if you need to run reports against these groups with Reporting or Analytics.
Please subscribe to the TEL blog to receive Questionmark updates and communication.
Kind regards
Roberta
QMP upgrade – completed
The Questionmark Perception upgrade has been successfully completed and the service has now been resumed.
Upcoming examinations. We would recommend staff to check that their questions and assessments are working as expected before making exams available to students.
Upgrade of your local installation of Authoring Manager. Your local installation of the Authoring Manager will need to be upgraded to version 5.7. We are working with IT Services to arrange this to be done automatically. In the meantime, please use the Terminal Server. Instructions on how to access the Terminal Server can be found on the Authoring Manager Installation page.
If you need further help with this please email tel-help@bristol.ac.uk
QMP upgrade – update
The QuestionMark perception upgrade has been completed as planned, and the service will be made available to users again on the morning of Monday 18 August.
QMP upgrade – 11th – 15th August 2014
The Questionmark upgrade will take place between Monday 11th August to Friday 15th August 2014. During this time the service will not be available to staff and students.
For further information please see:
If you have any queries regarding the Questionmark upgrade please email:
Blackboard Upgrade – Summer 2014
The 2014 Blackboard upgrade has been successfully completed. For more information on new and improved features see the TEL website.
Turnitin scheduled maintenance on July 26th
Turnitin have informed us of scheduled maintenance on July 26th, as follows:
“The Turnitin service may be unavailable during a scheduled maintenance period on Saturday, July 26th, 2014, from 9 AM to 9 PM U.S. Pacific Time (click for local time). We will be making significant upgrades to improve capacity and scalability as our service utilization grows. An announcement will appear for users within Turnitin in advance of when the system will be unavailable for this scheduled maintenance. This maintenance will affect Turnitin and TurnitinUK users. Instructors are encouraged to modify assignment due dates either before or at least several hours after the scheduled maintenance window.”
Turnitin also provides updates via the Turnitin System Status page or via Twitter at @TurnitinStatus.