Service Improvements

On July 5, we’re updating Blackboard to use the new Ultra Base Navigation. This update will give Blackboard a modern look and feel and provide easier access to important information.

Ultra Base Navigation has a modern, intuitive navigation menu that sits outside of courses and is always available.

Your courses will not change. They will look and operate exactly as they do now.

To enable Ultra Base Navigation, Blackboard will be unavailable for a short time on the afternoon of July 5, between 2 pm and 4 pm. After this, you will see a redesigned login page for Blackboard and can use the new navigation as soon as you log in.

Benefits

• A modern, intuitive user experience.
• It works well on mobile devices. This navigation is designed to work well regardless of what device you’re using.
• Only one click away. If you see something that needs your attention, just click on it and you will be taken directly there, minimizing clicks and saving time.

If you have any questions, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.

During the 2022/2023 year, Re/Play has been under review as part of the Digital Learning Environment project. There were several requests or user experience issues noted in the consultation and analysis phases which we are now addressing with some changes to the Re/Play set up. Nothing fundamental will change, but we hope that you see several improvements to the experience of Re/Play for the next academic year. These include:

1. Automatic release of lecture capture now 24 hours by default. The automatic release for Re/Play recordings will be reduced from 48 working hours to 24 working hours post recording. This change is based on student survey and face-to-face feedback gathered in partnership with Bristol SU as part of the DLE review. This is in response to the most requested student improvement to the recording process and will give students a chance to watch recordings sooner.
2. Improvement to quality of lecture capture recordings. Lecture capture will be recorded at a higher framerate by default. This means that you no longer have to request a ‘screencast’ capture if you plan to use a visualiser. All recordings will be able to capture handwriting from visualisers.
3. We are upgrading our connection with Blackboard to the newest version (LTI 1.3). This will ensure stability and enhanced security, but also brings user improvements. You will be able to embed recordings with a dedicated embedded player in Blackboard, rather than just a link. The use of the old, deprecated method of using an iframe to embed a video can now be discontinued.
4. An archiving policy is being created and enacted, which will send the oldest, unused video content to a cold storage archive for one year, and then delete that content. Any content which is in personal folders, or actively watched, will not be archived. This will remove a vast amount of unused data in our systems, which will improve the performance of the search within Re/Play. We are aware that some units will require longer periods of retention and are working with Schools to identify these units and remove them from the archiving process during consultation.
5. New training and support materials are being created to help you get the best from the Re/Play system. These will be advertised by the DEO in time for the next academic year.

End of support for Turnitin Basic Assignments

Following the transition to the Turnitin LTI in September 2022, the final end-of-life support for Turnitin Basic Assignments is underway. From September 2023:

• Students will no longer be able to download assignments or associated feedback produced prior to September 2022. The Digital Education Office have anticipated this, communicating with administration and teaching staff throughout 2022/23 to encourage students to download material in advance.
• If there is a need to access any data uploaded to Turnitin prior to September 2022, staff will be able to do this via the Turnitin website. Access to this website must remain exclusive to staff.

The way major tools such as Turnitin and Re/Play integrate with Blackboard is changing. From 2022/23 Blackboard integrations will all move to a new, more modern approach (LTI/ API replacing building blocks). All major changes will be implemented during the summer, in time for the next academic year.

Benefits

• Maintaining access to all the tools currently integrated with Blackboard.

Differences

• In many cases, the change will not be noticeable to you, but for some tools the new integration may mean some changes to the way the tool works, or where you find it in Blackboard. Support and information for staff and students for these tools will be made available closer to the time.
• Turnitin and Re/Play, two significant integrations with Blackboard, will be affected by this change, and further details about those can be found below.

“Undo” and “redo” in Bb Annotate

For staff marking assignments using Bb Annotate, "undo" and "redo" options will be added. An instructor may undo a change and then, if inclined, redo it. "Undo" and "redo" will not apply to comments, but all other annotations will be included.

After August 1, new Blackboard courses will be created for the 2022-23 taught units. These will be a copy of the previous year’s course, where that exists, including any template.

New units, or units that have had a change of unit code or teaching block, will be generated as a copy of the school’s template, or as blank Blackboard course if your school does not have a template. Please contact the DEO if you are interested in adopting a school template for the 23/24 academic year.

Students are automatically enrolled onto the courses for the programme and units that they are registered to in SITS. Instructor enrolments are copied from the previous year’s course; instructors will need to be manually enrolled onto any new courses. Please contact your school office if you to be added to any new Blackboard courses.

Programme-level courses and organisations are persistent and do not roll over.

We will post on the Digital Education blog when the rollover is complete; you can subscribe to the blog to receive posts via email.

Qwickly Attendance and Course Tools will be receiving an essential system update, which will include the following improvements.

Attendance

• Improved accessibility and user experience, using screen space more efficiently
• Navigation changes to provide keyboard accessibility and allow for future updates
• Creation of a "Student Details" card summarising each student’s attendance status totals
• Instructor access to course totals reports
• Column headings will remain visible when scrolling down course attendance report.

Course Tools

• New summary screen confirming whether actions are successful or unsuccessful
• Improved help features with links to videos for each tool
• Navigation changes to organise tools into similar groups, making them easier to find
• Ability to sort courses by course name, course code, or course term
• Ability to set availability for "Create Content".

Further details can be found in Qwickly’s own guidance on the updates for Attendance and Course Tools.

The Campus Pack features in Blackboard will become unavailable this summer, because the tool is no longer being supported by the supplier. Once Campus Pack is unavailable it will not be possible to add new Campus Pack items into courses; Blackboard's own blogs and wikis can still be used, of course.

If you have a Blackboard course or organisation that already contains Campus Pack features, you will still be able to access these as you can at present. Students will also be able to access them to view old posts unless you choose to make Campus Pack unavailable in your course.

From the summer of 2023, the deprecation of Blackboard building blocks will mean that Campus Pack features will not be accessible at all.

During the spring of 2022 a technical service review of the Re/Play Service was completed, led by an external consultant. Recommendations from the report were added to the planned summer improvement programme. The work will be completed by the start of the 22/23 academic year.

Benefits

• Prioritising and implementing recommendations to better meet the needs of staff and students.
• Replacing the Blackboard: Re/Play integration to ensure a more robust system.
• Clarifying and streamlining our guidance, and providing new, more simplified guidance based on feedback from staff and students.
• Making the new video player available, which will improve playback for students, and add important accessibility features.
• Implementing automated processes to clean up audio quality (which will improve caption accuracy).
• Staff will be able to use Macs in rooms where Re/Play is available: HDMI connections from Macs will now work with audio and video.

Differences

In many respects the Re/Play system will look and work in the same way as previously – the Blackboard menu link and ‘My Re/Play’ link will be the same, as will the lecture capture set up. However, the main improvement will be to stability of the system, with much reduced downtime, and improved usability. The new integration will improve the way Re/Play content is authenticated, so there should be far fewer incidents of students being unable to view materials you share with them. The new player will add the options to change the font size and colour for captions, and captions should be more accurate, reducing the amount of editing required.

Turnitin will no longer support our current method of integration with Blackboard after August 2022. The University will be switching to a new Turnitin integration with Blackboard, called Turnitin LTI, from September 2022.

Benefits

• Greater efficiency - the ability to do anonymous distributed marking using a single Turnitin submission point, filtering by Blackboard groups.
• A new analytics dashboard for Instructors.
• Interface improvements.
• Improved syncing of data between Turnitin and Blackboard (Sync grades is now automatic).

Differences

The Feedback Studio interface used for marking and viewing feedback will remain the same, but other aspects of Turnitin will be different, including:

• A slight change to the way Instructors set up and access new LTI Turnitin assignments.
• Students will receive a downloadable onscreen digital receipt rather than an email.
• The way Instructors can bulk upload assignments will change.

Further information

Digitally Ready, our digital induction course for new students, will be available again from August. We are undertaking our annual review and update of the content, based on feedback from last year as well as collaborative work with our Student Digital Champions. This year, we will also be adding new information on keeping safe online, cyber security, and malware. Digitally Ready will be automatically available to all new students as they register and receive their Blackboard log ins. A link is always available from our Student Support page.

The Content Editor allows users to add image attributes. Now it also supports adding the "title" attribute. This attribute adds text tips to images. We still recommend using an alternative description, as this makes content more accessible, while a title doesn't.

A timeout warning will appear to help users avoid losing work when using Blackboard for long periods of time. When a user is idle for over three hours, their Blackboard “session” ends, and they must log in again to continue to use Blackboard. When a user saves a page or uses a button, however, the session refreshes and stays active for three more hours.

However, there can be times a user is working but considered idle. This happens because the browser is not sending data to Blackboard. Some examples are when a user is:

• authoring a Discussion Board post,
• authoring an Assignment submission in the text editor, or
• creating a Content Item.

Now, users whose session is ending soon will receive a warning. This warning will appear at least six minutes before the session times out. If the user closes the warning before the session ends, the session will extend for three more hours.

If the user closes the warning after the session ends (for example, if they were away from their computer when the warning appeared), they will return to the current page instead of returning to the login page. This allows the user to copy anything before it is lost. They will then be returned to the login page when they select any link or button on the page.