Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
Turnitin has identified an issue with the paper “Move To” feature in the assignment inbox which may affect Instructors. It is prompting users to delete papers instead of move them. Turnitin are working on a fix. They advise users to click “Cancel” on the prompt and avoid using this feature until it has been fixed.
If you have any concerns or queries please contact tel-help@bristol.ac.uk
Dear All
As you may be aware from the IT Services blog http://www.bris.ac.uk/it-services/news/2014/apex2may.html the system that supports eReserve requests will be unavailable 12:00 – 15:00 on 27 May.
What this will means is that you will not be able to request any new eReserves for that 3 hour slot. However any eReserves that have already been placed on Blackboard will be available to staff and students as normal. Blackboard will not be affected in any way.
Regards
Joseph Gliddon
Learning Technologist
Dear All
Turn it in now report that they have fixed the problem with slow submissions on their system. Students should now find that the speeds are normal/acceptable.
Staff will still experience delay in the processing of the % matches (the system has a few days backlog to process) so expect a delay of several hours to 2 days after your students have submitted before you see the % match appearing.
Regards
Joseph Gliddon
Learning Technologist
Dear All
The “Turn it in” software provider are currently experiencing problems with all UK submissions http://submit.ac.uk/en_gb/services/system-status
We are monitoring the situation and will update you as soon as we have more details.
If you are submitting an essay to Turnitin via our Blackboard system you are likely to experience delays (the pages will load slowly). For staff you will find that the originality reports will take a significant time to appear.
Regards
Joseph Gliddon
Learning Technologist
Blackboard will now be available to users between 8 am and Noon on the 16th April.
Apologies for any confusion please let your students now that this work has been cancelled please contact us by email (TEL-Help@bristol.ac.uk) if you have any questions.
There were problems accessing Blackboard over the weekend of 15/16 March. This was due to a partial failure of automatic update scripts. As a result, a number of students and staff were unable to access some courses. The issue was investigated on Sunday and a fix put in place. As a result, all staff and students should now have access to all their courses, and this issue should not arise again.
We apologise for the inconvenience this issue caused to many of our users this weekend.
On Tuesday 18th March Blackboard will be unavailable for 15 minutes between 7 and 7.15am.
During this time our colleagues in Information Services will be applying a minor fix to the system which will address issues users have been experiencing when accessing Blackboard via Internet Explorer 11.
If you have any questions please email TEL-Help@bristol.ac.uk
The licence code for Wimba Create will expire on 12 March 2014. To address this, all instances of Wimba Create on University-managed PCs will be automatically upgraded to the latest and final release of Wimba Create (v2.6.1) over the next few days. This version includes the new licence code.
This means users do not need to do anything. If, however, your instance of Wimba Create or its licence code does not upgrade automatically, the advice is to log out of your machine at the end of the day but leave it switched on. This is because updates are pushed out during the night. If after several attempts at this you still do not have the latest version or licence code, contact service-desk@bristol.ac.uk.
Users with Wimba Create installed on non-University PCs, such as personal computers at home, can get the latest version of the software and licence code from the Blackboard course called ‘Wimba Create’. For information on how to access that, visit http://www.bris.ac.uk/esu/e-learning/support/tools/wimba/.
Users should also note that the newer version of Wimba Create presents no changes for end users. The key difference is that it works with MS Office up to 2013 (rather than 2010).
Campus Pack Scheduled Maintenance – March 15th 2014
The Campus Pack engineering team are undertaking an infrastructure upgrade. This upgrade is scheduled for Saturday, March 15th at 01:00 GMT and is expected to last up to 2 hours.
This will affect all of our clients on our UK cluster and Campus Pack will be inaccessible during this time.
If you have any questions please email TEL-Help@bristol.ac.uk
Due to a scheduled server upgrade, Panopto recording and playback may be unavailable between the hours of 1 AM and 4 AM on Sunday, 23rd March.
Please direct any questions to TEL-help@bristol.ac.uk