Problems accessing Blackboard on weekend of 15/16 March

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.

Blackboard unavailable – 18th March 7 – 7.15am

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

 

Important update – Wimba Create licence

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.

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

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.