Turnitin will be unavailable between 16:00 and 22:00 on Saturday 7 February 2026 for scheduled maintenance.
During this time, you will be unable to submit or grade any assessments.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
Now that semester 1 teaching has finished and we are moving towards the assessment period, we wanted to write a blogpost to highlight the analytical reports that are available in Blackboard.
These reports can be used to monitor Blackboard usage and engagement and help you to re-enforce messages to students.
By default, the student progress summary is enabled on all content items in Blackboard courses.
This allows Blackboard to record when content has been opened, and students are able to mark tasks as complete.
To access the report, click on the … to the right of the content item and select Student Progress:
There you’ll see the progress report:
From this page, you can also filter students by those who have unopened the content, those who have started it, and those who have marked it as complete.
If you apply a filter, you can message the highlighted students using the message button.
Using Blackboard tests? You can run a report to analyse the questions with:
In addition to this, it also allows you to re-examine questions with the Discrimination report. This indicates how well questions differentiate between students across all levels.
The difficulty report indicates which questions are easy, medium and hard.
To view the report (once the test has ended), navigate to the test and select Question Analysis:
The report will run and you will receive an email once it has completed:
Making use of Discussions in your Blackboard course? Then you can run a report for the overview which will give you the total number of active students, the average number of posts per students, as well as the average wordcount for blogposts.
You can click on Student Activity for the overview:
You can use the message feature to contact students who haven’t engaged, as well as see the top participants, and the responses with the most replies.
The Course Analytics page allows you to flag alert settings for students based on the amount of time spent in the course and the dates since their last access.
Choose Analytics from the top menu:
You have two views:
For further information on using the Analytics feature, see Blackboard Help: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Ultra/Performance/Course_Reports/Course_Activity_Related_to_Grades
If you are interested in looking in more detail at course analytics, we are holding an online training session on Monday 9 February between 15:10-16:00. You can book your place online via the training booking page.
Happy New Year!
Just before the Christmas vacation period, we hosted our final event of the year: a mini conference on Generative AI.
The materials from this Mini Conference are now available on our webpages.
Thank you very much to our presenters from the Departments of Computer Science, Geography and Earth Sciences, and the School of Literature and Languages.
And a special thank you to our external speakers: James Fern and Richard Mason from Bath University who gave us a brilliant overview of the two-lane approach to assessment design that Bath is currently working through.
We look forward to welcoming you to one of our upcoming events.
We’ve had some fantastic experiences and milestones this year.
Back in March, we announced our 2025 Exemplary Course Award and highly commended recipients.
In April, we hosted a Mini Conference on Employability and the Inclusive Curriculum in collaboration with colleagues in Careers and Employability.
In July, we had our 13th Annual Education and Student Experience Conference with over 200 attendees across 3 days.
At this event, a new Education and Student Experience Award Fund was announced, and we confirmed the recipients of these in November.
In November, we took part in Blackboard Ally Fix your Content Day, making the content of our Virtual Learning Environment even more accessible. We placed 3rd in the UK and 60th on the international leaderboard.
From a technical perspective, we’re really pleased with the introduction of automatic captions on lecture recordings, Blackboard’s Learning Object Repository, badges and achievements, and the e-submission review.
And we’re rounding the year off with a Mini Conference on Generative AI on Thursday 18 December. We’ve got a fantastic programme and there is still time to book your place.
We’re excited about what 2026 will bring in the Digital Education arena.
Some initial things that we’ll be working on and want to draw your attention to.
Applications for the Exemplary Course Award 2026 will close on Friday 30 January.
On January 8 there will be a minor update to the Blackboard interface.
We’re planning our next Mini Conference in collaboration with colleagues in Student Journey for April 2026. Further information will be made available soon.
And our 14th Education and Student Experience Conference will take place between 8-10 September 2026. Keep an eye out for updates, call for proposals, and external speaker announcements.
We’ve got our training programme available on the booking system for Semester 2 for colleagues to book onto.
We’re looking forward to working further with you in 2026.
We hope you have a restful break.
Kate, Keziah, & Jim
On Thursday 8 January, there will be a minor update to the Blackboard interface.
There is no downtime associated with this update, and Blackboard will continue to function normally during this period.
These changes include:
In addition to this, to maximise screen space, Blackboard will remove the nested folder view.
If you have any issues, please contact the Digital Education Team on elearning@aber.ac.uk.
We are delighted to confirm our programme for our final event of the year on Thursday 18 December.
Our Mini Conference on Generative AI is taking place between 09:30 and 15:30. We are running this as a hybrid event. For those wanting to join in person, it will take place in the Visualisation Centre building, VC, 0.06.
We are delighted to confirm our external speakers:
James Fern and Richard Mason will be joining us to share the 2-lane approach to Generative AI Assessment Design that has been adopted at Bath University.
You can read more about this on their webpages: The Two-Lane Approach to GenAI Assessment Categorisation – Learning and Teaching Hub
In addition to James and Richard, we have an exciting line up:
To see the full programme and abstracts, see our webpage. You can book your place clicking on this link.
Earlier this year, Professor Anwen Jones announced the Education and Student Experience Award Fund at the 13th Annual Education and Student Experience Conference.
We are delighted to confirm this year’s winners and the 4 enhancement projects that they will be leading over the coming year:
Thank you to all applicants for submitting a proposal and to the awards panel.
There will be opportunities to hear more about these projects at next year’s annual Education and Student Experience Conference.
Applications for the Exemplary Course Award 2026 are now open.
The deadline for submissions is 12pm, 30 January 2026.
As part of this process, applicants are asked to identify 3 standout practices and assess their course across 4 areas:
The application form is available to download from our webpages.
To assist colleagues, we have a training session available on Wednesday 10 December at 10:10. Places can be booked online.
In addition to this, we are running 4 E-learning Excellence training sessions (based on the 4 assessment criteria). These sessions are available to all colleagues, whether they are considering submitting an application or not. Places can be booked online.
If you have any questions, please contact the Digital Education Group (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
Turnitin has announced the retirement of their Turnitin app at the end of the year, December 2025.
The Feedback Studio iPad app will be retired and no longer available. Instructors can continue to access Feedback Studio as usual through Blackboard. This includes mobile devices and tablets.
Turnitin are working on developing a New Standard Assignment, so instructors can review and provide feedback on student work from tablets without needing a separate app. We will release comms regarding this new service in due course.
If you have any questions or concerns about this, please don’t hesitate to contact us (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
We’re pleased to announce the dates for Aberystwyth University’s 14th annual Education and Student Experience Conference.
We will be hosting the conference between Tuesday 8 – Thursday 10 September 2026.
We will start work on planning and establishing themes and guest speakers for the conference.
Conference themes, calls for proposals, and external speakers will be announced in the new year. Keep an eye on our webpages and our blog for further information.
If there is a particular topic that you would like the conference to address, do get in touch via elearning@aber.ac.uk.