Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office
On Tuesday the 10th December our colleagues in Information services will be undertaking work that will affect Blackboard. This work is scheduled to take place between 5pm and 8pm and during this time the Blackboard service will not be available for users.
More information about this work can be found on the Information Services web site here
If you have any questions please contact the main service desk service-desk@bristol.ac.uk
Dear Students and Staff
We are happy to announce the following improvements to the Blackboard mobile app:
You will now login to Blackboard using the Blackboard Mobile app, which means the login boxes will be the proper size (no more zooming in on your phone, just type in your username and password)
The app can remember your login (removing the need to login on your phone over and over again). One small caveat, if you are using a mobile device that you share with others (ie a tablet) you should disable this – click Settings, Privacy, Remember password
Push notifications which alert you when … will work more effectively. When you get a mobile notification and click on it – you will be taken to the app, and directed to the part of Blackboard that generated the notification (until now clicking on a notification took you to the main menu of Blackboard.)
If you are able to edit Blackboard courses or organisations you will now be able to add announcements and items to your course using your mobile.
Announcements – Simply click “Add”, give it a subject and description, then click “Post” to submit it to the course.
Items – exactly the same as Announcements but you can also click attach to add files (you have lots of options of where to get things to attach – your phone, dropbox, google drive etc. It copes with most files and will convert unusual things (Google docs etc) into a pdf.
You can add your Blackboard calendar to Google as follows:
Please note that any editing of events has to be done in Blackboard.
In the last week an issue was identified where emails sent from University systems – like Blackboard, or MyBristol – may have been wrongly identified as spam and automatically consigned to individual Gmail account spam folders. This could mean that important information may not have reached all of the intended recipients. The issue has now been resolved but you may wish to check your spam folder, and also advise your students to check theirs. On a more general note, checking spam folders regularly to ensure emails have not been incorrectly identified as spam is recommended.
Quick Tools, on your Blackboard home page, gives instructors access to two tools –
1) Course Availability – With one click you can manage the visibility of courses to your students. By switching the status from Off to On the course is instantly visible to the students enrolled. This saves you having to go in to the course control panel of each course and updating the availability.
Please note that this controls the settings for visibility to all students not your own view of Blackboard.
2) Post Announcement – Using this tool you can send the same announcement to more than one course. Select the courses you wish to post the announcement, type the message, select email if required and submit. This will then be posted in all of the selected courses. At the current time the tool only allows for text only announcements and there is no ability to attach files.
If you have any feedback about this tool or any questions please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk
The testing we have been undertaking to ensure the collection and distribution of Notifications and Updates in Blackboard can run without affecting overall performance is nearly complete.
We are happy that the solution we have in place will allow these to work as expected. To test this we will be switching the distribution back on overnight tonight – please note that to start off with you will receive a larger than normal number while the system catches up.
If you have any questions please email TEL-Help@bristol.ac.uk
As a final part of our work to ensure the Blackboard service runs smoothly and we can use Notifications, we are undertaking some final work between 7am and 8am on Tuesday 8th October.
During this time there is a chance that Blackboard will be affected and running slower than normal.
If you have any questions, please email TEL-Help@bristol.ac.uk
In order to address the slow running of Blackboard we have taken the action of switching off the collection of Notifications (both web and mobile) on the advice of Blackboard and our colleagues in IS. Since making this change to the system we have not had any problems with the speed of the service.
We are currently addressing these problems and are hopeful that we will be able to switch the Notifications back on as soon as possible.
Apologies once again for any inconvenience caused by the slow running of the service earlier this week.
If you have any questions, please email TEL-Help@bristol.ac.uk
Following on from the problems with the speed of the Blackboard service earlier today we will be switching off the Notifications Dashboard from tonight.
We will be monitoring the impact of this change and will provide updates via this blog.
If you have any questions, please email TEL-Help@bristol.ac.uk
We are currently experiencing database problems with Blackboard and as a result the service is running very slowly.
Our colleagues in Information Services are working to fix the problem.
Apologies for any inconvenience this may be causing you at this busy time of year.
If you have any questions please email TEL-Help@bristol.ac.uk