Dear All

At approximately 10.10 am today (10th December 2012) Blackboard froze for a couple of minutes and, during this time, was not providing web-pages to users. It was then working at a reduced speed for most of the morning. Please accept our apologies for this slow-down.

However, all systems are now running as normal. The underlying cause of the problem is still being investigated, but IT Services believe it was issues with the University’s Storage Area Network caused by rescheduled database backups.

Posted: December 10th, 2012 under 9.1. known issues, Service announcements.
Comments: none

When an instructor creates an assignment with a due date, the “Create” or “Edit” assignment screen currently tells them, in section 5 “Due dates”,  that “Submissions are not accepted after this date and are marked Missed”. This is not the case. Late assignments will be accepted if the submission point is available, and will be marked as ‘Late Submission’ in the Grade Center.

Posted: April 4th, 2012 under 9.1. known issues, Staff FAQs.
Comments: none

The Sign Up List tool in Blackboard is a building block provided by a third party. Since well before beginning our upgrade process in the summer to Blackboard 9.1 we have been expecting the release of the new building block – as the developer institution also upgraded to Blackboard 9.1 over the summer. We have left the Sign Up tool as available in Blackboard as we did not want to stop access to any information contained in current courses.

While the current version of the sign up list is still available for use there are some important considerations as it is not fully functioning. If you do wish to use this please read the notes below prior to adding to your course.

What works -

• Adding a sign up list to content area
• Students adding themselves to lists
• Students removing themselves from lists when the list is not full
• Notification that the list is full
• Adding students to reserve list
• Export to excel (does not show reserve list)
• Export to CSV file (does show reserve list)

What does not work -

• Instructors manually adding users
• Instructors manually removing users
• Students removing themselves when list is full
• Moving students from reserve list to main list
• Printing directly from Blackboard

We will post further information as soon as the updated tool becomes available from the the third party, in the mean time another option is to use the sign up functionality in the Groups tool. This has the advantage of linking directly to the Group tools such as email. If you would like some guidance on using this please contact bb-help@bristol.ac.uk.

UPDATE 07/11/2011 – We have now received the alpha version of the building block for 9.1 and this is being added to our test environment so we can fully test functionality.

Posted: October 18th, 2011 under 9.1. known issues.
Comments: none

If you receive a message stating that emails have not been sent when posting an announcement, please check your course name. If the name has a colon (:) in the title the email tool in Blackboard will not work. This is a known issue with the software and is due to be fixed in an upcoming Service Pack.

Workaround.

• Create the announcement as normal
• Copy the message text
• Post the announcement
• Go to course tools and click send email
• Select the group of users you wish to send the email to e.g. All student users
• Paste the text from the announcement in to the message box
• Click Submit

Posted: October 12th, 2011 under 9.1. known issues.
Comments: none