From December 2020 if you are enrolled on a course as a Teaching Assistant, you can no longer enrol a colleague and assign them a staff role (e.g. Instructor, Teaching Assistant or Marker).
Workaround

• Enrol the user as a Student
• Then Change User’s Role

If you are not already logged in to Box of Broadcasts, embedded videos display a message “Please sign into bob and refresh this page”. Clicking on this takes you to the BoB login page in a new browser tab.
After signing in to BoB, you have to return to Blackboard and Refresh the page in order to watch the embedded video.This appears to be intended behaviour, but it can appear to users that the login is not working. Using a WAYFless link as described in our guide Linking to Box of Broadcasts might provide the best user experience.

In some cases, images inserted into Word documents and submitted to a Blackboard assignment do not display in Blackboard Annotate. This applies if students

• crop the image
• and use Tight, Through, or Parallel wrapping modes to wrap the text around the image.

The image will display correctly if you download the file and view it in Word.

In a course Content area if you choose:
Build Content -> Image -> Preview

Do not click Submit on the Preview screen.

If you do, an error will be displayed.

To attach the image successfully, from the Preview screen choose Back and Submit from the Image properties screen, or alternatively do not go into the Preview mode and simply Submit.

After setting up your microphone or camera, you MUST close the Recording window, then reopen it again to make your recording. If you try to record immediately after setting up your microphone, without closing and reopening the window, your recording will be silent.

Further details

Users may hear a cracking noise when playing MP4 media files in Blackboard Collaborate using Firefox browser (especially when created using PowerPoint). The workaround would be to use Chrome, Edge or Safari instead, or download the files to your system and play via a media player application.

If you mark work using a Blackboard scoring rubric which is set up as a Percentage Range rubric, students will see their overall mark, and will see which cells of the rubric have been highlighted. However they will not see the actual score you have assigned for each cell.

 

If you’ve used a qualitative rubric with your Blackboard Assignment, once you give the attempt you’re making a grade, making any further changes to the rubric will automatically reset the grade to 0. If you need to edit your rubric after the fact, please make a note of the grade you’ve previously assigned as you will have to re-enter it. If you’re using a scoring rubric, the issue does not exist as the new grade will automatically be assigned by the rubric itself.

Following our move to Blackboard SaaS, the third party SignUp List tool is no longer available.

Blackboard Self-Enrol Groups offer similar functionality and may well meet your needs:

Creating a self-enrol group

Creating multiple self-enrol groups

For one-to-one bookings, MS Bookings may be an option – see this post on the DTS News Feed.

We recommend that you do NOT tick the Auto-Submit box when deploying a Test as there is a known issue where, if students have an unreliable internet connection, this setting could lead to their attempts being submitted prematurely.
Blackboard also recommend turning off the “force completion” option, so that if a student experiences technical issues and is logged out of the test, they can resume and complete the test.For further advice on settings to use with timed tests, see Blackboard Tests: Timer, Autosubmit and Force Completion settings

Members of some breakout groups are unable to hear each others’ audio or see each others’ video. This issue does not affect all breakout groups and does not occur for all sessions.

Resolution/Workaround:
A workaround for this issue is to move all members of the affected breakout group into another breakout group.
The other breakout group may be an existing group that is unaffected by the issue, or you can create a new breakout group.

Resolved 2 Feb 2021

When using Mac OS “Big Sur” 11.0 or “Catalina” 10.15 and Safari 14 with Collaborate Ultra the audio a user hears is breaking up or cracking.
Affected Platforms
Mac OS “Big Sur” 11.0 and Safari 14
Mac OS “Catalina” 11.0 and Safari 14

Resolution/Workaround:
If Safari 14 is installed on your computer, please plan on using either Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox with Collaborate Ultra sessions.

For platform stability during this time of unprecedented demand, the following Collaborate features have been temporarily disabled by Blackboard:

• Timer
• Chat typing indicator
• Netstats bandwidth indicator (tells you how strong someone’s internet connection is)

Blackboard Collaborate Ultra will not support versions of Google Chrome below version 79 – see Collaborate Ultra supported browsers.

Chromebook devices running Chrome version 78 or earlier will be presented with an error when attempting to join a Blackboard Collaborate Ultra session. Please update your browser to the latest Chrome version.

If you are unable to update Chrome, you may be able to install an alternate browser from the Google Play Store:

• Microsoft Edge
• Mozilla Firefox (requires a touch-screen device)

Users running Mac OS 10.15 Catalina may experience issues starting appshare while using Ultra. Visit this Blackboard support article for more information: Ultra Experience – Mac OS 10.15 Catalina users are unable to appshare.

Resolution/Workaround:
1. Select the Apple in the upper left hand corner of the screen
2. Select System Preference
3. Select Security & Privacy
4. Note: You will need to unlock this window to make changes by clicking on the lock in the bottom left corner of this windo
5. Select the Privacy tab at the top of the dialog box
6. Scroll down on the left hand side of the screen to Screen Recording
7. Check the box next to Google Chrome or whichever browser you are running
8. You will then be prompted to restart your browser
9. Launch your Ultra session again and start appshare

If you are trying to join a session but the purple wheel keeps spinning for longer than usual, please ensure “Third Party Cookies” are not being blocked by your browser. To fix the issue, please go to browser settings and change the setting to allow “Third Party cookies”. To open the cookies settings page in Chrome, copy and paste “chrome://settings/content/cookies” into your Chrome address bar and press enter.

If you are using Microsoft Edge browser and can’t hear the moderator or presenter. Please try to leave the session and join again. If that doesn’t work, please use Chrome browser instead.
Please note that as of 01 July 2020 Collaborate no longer supports Native Microsoft Edge. If you have admin privileges on your computer you can Download Microsoft Edge (Chromium) which is supported.

“Some users are experiencing a busy or unavailable signal when trying to join a session via telephone. We are aware of this issue and are working to increase our dial-in capacity for sessions as we know this is an important feature. In the short-term, users who wish to join their session via a mobile device should use their mobile browser.

Collaborate is optimized for the Safari browser on iOS devices and the Chrome browser on Android devices.

For additional best practices on how to use Collaborate, please see these best practices for Moderators and these best practices for Participants.”

If joining a Collaborate session on an iPhone, you may not be able to see edits made to the whiteboard.
There is no workaround currently.  If you experience this issue using an iOS device, please switch to a PC or Mac if possible.  You can also try a different iOS device, if you have one available.

Description: 

With the latest release of Google Chrome (version 92) it is not possible to create a Turnitin assignment where the Post Date is more than two weeks later than the assignment Due Date.

Turnitin are working on a fix for this.

Resolution/Workaround: If you have already been updated to Chrome version 92, then switch to Firefox to create Turnitin assignments.

Microsoft files generated using Windows, including .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .pptx, .ppt, .ppsx, and .pps files, can occasionally fail to process when uploaded to Turnitin. Files created using other operating systems are unaffected.

Resolution/Workaround: Convert your file to a PDF before attempting to upload it to Turnitin. This ensures it is in a format we can process gracefully and without any problems. Find out more here.

When trying to download the original version of the file as submitted, users may get a message reading ‘There was an error processing your request.

Resolution/Workaround: Turnitin is working on a fix, but in the mean time only option would be to disable anonymous marking.

 

We are aware of some unusual error code appearing at the top of the Turintin assignment view page, e.g  {if(—-.defineProperty&Object)try{v……..). This code is only visible to users with Admin permissions. Doesn’t affect Turnitin functionality. Please continue using Turinitin.

Affected users: BB users with Admin permissions.

Resolution/Workaround: We will be deploying the fix when its most convenient to do so.

 

Audio feedback player in Turnitin feedback studio does not playback full feedback when using Safari browser. Please use Chrome, Microsoft Edge or Firefox as a workaround.

Papers which consist of scanned images may display incorrectly in the Feedback Studio.

Workaround: switch off High Resolution display. If the problem persists, download the paper and view it offline.

When trying to download multiple Grading papers (papers with markup and similarity layers visible) from the Turnitin Assignment inbox or Feedback Studio, you may encounter issues with some files not downloading. This happens when a file has a very large number of small similarity report matches, making the file large in size, taking a long time to render and become ready to download.

If you download multiple files, you may have some of them missing from the zip file generated.

Turnitin are aware of the issue and are working on resolving this.

If you have any questions please contact us at it@reading.ac.uk.