Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
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.
Dear colleagues ,
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
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.
The 2014 Blackboard upgrade has been successfully completed. For more information on new and improved features see the TEL website.
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.
The 2014 Blackboard upgrade will take place between Tuesday 22nd July and Friday 25th July. A temporary read-only replacement service will be available during this time. Please do not edit courses after Sunday 20th July until the upgrade is complete. Edits made during this time will not be saved. The last date to request external accounts before the upgrade is Friday 18th July, by 4pm.
The familiar interface remains in the new version (which is known as SP14), but there are improvements in the student and staff experience, particularly in relation to online submission and marking.
Once again, the content of this year’s unit courses will be copied into 2014-15 versions from 1st August. This means that you may see 2013 as well as 2014 courses on Blackboard. Historic and current versions are clearly identified by a year suffix.
Further information and short videos on some of the new features can be found on the Blackboard Upgrade website.
If you have any questions please contact tel-help@bristol.ac.uk
There are a number of technology enhanced learning (TEL) developments happening this year, including upgrades of both Blackboard and Questionmark during the summer.
The Blackboard upgrade will take place between Tuesday 22nd July and Friday 25th July. Questionmark will be upgraded during the week beginning Monday 11th August.
Update from IT Services:
At 12 noon today there was a power outage that affected network facilities and the data centre in the Computer Centre. This outage had the effect of removing network access across the University and making the majority of online services unavailable, including the University website.
Power came back very quickly but both the network and services needed to be restarted. The network was restored at around 12:45 . Individual services were restored as soon as possible thereafter. The majority of services were back by around 14:00.
Most services are now back with the exception of the Library and IT Services websites. Staff who access their Gmail via the IT Services website are advised to do so via the University portal, MyBristol.