Turn it in – submissions now working

Posted on by Joseph Gliddon

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

Turn it in problems

Posted on by Joseph Gliddon

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

Problems accessing Blackboard on weekend of 15/16 March

Posted on by Hanrahan Highland

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.

Important update – Wimba Create licence

Posted on by Tel Team

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 Tools unavailable – 15th March 1am – 3am.

Posted on by Tel Team

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

Wikis and blogs (Campus Pack) working again – 3rd March

Posted on by Joseph Gliddon

UPDATE: The wikis and blogs are working again – Learning Objects have fixed the problem with their website.

The third-party wikis and blogs that are integrated into Blackboard are not currently working (in simple terms the website that hosts these appears to be offline). This will mean when you go into a Learning Objects or Campus Pack wiki or blog then you will see a “Page not available” error. We have contacted the vendors and expect to see the website back up and running shortly – we will update this post when they are.

Turnitin update – new option to accept any file type

Posted on by Tel Team

Turnitin’s latest update  includes the option for Instructors to choose to allow any file type as a submission. Although Turnitin will not produce Originality Reports for all file types, this provides the ability to give/receive feedback using Grademark on files for which Originality Reports cannot be generated, and files that cannot be displayed in the Document Viewer. This includes images, music, video, and other file types. Turnitin have provided the following information about this new feature:

Instructors will see a new assignment setting when creating or editing Paper assignments in Turnitin. The new setting will appear below the assignment name and point value fields, and will have two options: “Allow only file types that Turnitin can check for originality” and “Allow any file type”.

The system default will remain “Allow only file types that Turnitin can check for originality”. The requirements for generating an Originality Report have not been changed, they are:

  • The file must be less than 400 pages in length
  • The file must be less than 20 MB
  • The file must contain more than 20 words of text
  • The file must be in one of these file formats: Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, WordPerfect, PostScript, PDF, HTML, RTF, OpenOffice (ODT), Hangul (HWP), Google Docs (submitted via the Google Drive submission option), plain text files.

If “Allow any file type” is selected, any file that is less than 20 MB and that is less than 400 pages in length will be allowed to be submitted. If the submitted file meets the requirements for generating an Originality Report (listed above) an Originality Report will be created for the file.

For more information, go to Turnitin’s Help Centre and search for “allow any file type”. If you have any questions, please contact tel-help@bristol.ac.uk.