Turnitin will be unavailable between 16:30 and 20:30 on Saturday 27 January 2024 for scheduled maintenance.
During this time, you will be unable to submit or grade any assessments.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
On 31 December 2023, Blackboard is retiring Building Blocks as an integration solution for third party tools and they will no longer function in Blackboard. This will not affect Blackboard Learn Ultra Courses.
Whilst we made use of Building Blocks in Blackboard Learn Original (courses which ran before 2023-24), your Blackboard Learn Ultra Courses do not use them.
Building Blocks are installed software packages used to integrate tools such as Panopto and Turnitin (among many others) into Blackboard. Over the past two years we have upgraded these tools to LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) integrations. The retiring of Building Blocks was one of the drivers for moving to Blackboard Learn Ultra.
LTIs offer us access to regular updates, bugs fixes, and ongoing developments and enhancements designed for Blackboard Ultra. Building Blocks required manual upgrades and received infrequent updates as this form of integration approached retirement.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit has done extensive testing to ensure that this change will have as minimal an impact as possible on current Blackboard Learn Ultra courses.
We will undertake the work of disabling Building Blocks on Tuesday 12 December during the regular IS Tuesday Morning Maintenance window in preparation for their final retirement.
If you come across any issues, please contact elearning@aber.ac.uk.
AirServer, the software used to connect mobile devices to teaching room equipment, is being retired.
Over increasing years, AirServer has been unable to cater for different types of mobile devices.
A workaround using Microsoft Teams can be used to link your tablet devices to teaching room equipment.
Take a look at our FAQ: How do I connect a tablet / mobile device to a teaching room machine?
If you have any questions, please contact Information Services (is@aber.ac.uk).
In our previous blogpost we outlined some of the changes to Panopto with our move to Blackboard Learn Ultra.
In this blogpost we’ll outline the changes to using Panopto for Assignments. Panopto Assignments are used for students to submit a recording or presentation.
As part of this change, we recommend that you:
The advantages to this new workflow are that:
To support staff with this process, we have a Panopto Assignment guide that takes you through setting up the assignment, student submission, and marking on our Lecture Capture webpages.
We’ve also got a FAQ for staff and students.
If you’ve got any questions, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
As part of the wider Blackboard Ultra project, our Panopto integration has been upgraded to work with Blackboard Ultra. This has provided us with an opportunity to make some changes and improvements.
You can now access the Panopto server via Panopto.aber.ac.uk
Panopto folders are now organised by academic year.
Staff have frequently requested that the Panopto folders for their Blackboard Courses are organised by academic year rather than as a long list. The Panopto upgrade work gave us an opportunity to restructure our folders as requested.
Top level year folders will appear greyed out, but you still have access to your Panopto folders within.
You can either find the Panopto folder you want to record into via the folders or search for the Panopto folder you want to record into.
To share Panopto recordings from previous years Panopto folders, copy the recordings into the current years’ folder of the course. This can be done via Panopto.aber.ac.uk. This grants all students enrolled on the current years’ course in Blackboard access to view the recordings. See this FAQ.
Everyone now has a folder in Panopto called My Folder that they can record into. In the Panopto Recorder it can be found under Quick Access.
My Folder is useful for recordings that staff or students do not want to share with others immediately or when they cannot find a suitable folder to record into.
Recordings can be moved from My Folder into another Panopto Folder later. To copy or move a Panopto recording to another folder See this FAQ.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is pleased to announce that Information Services has procured Blackboard Ally as part of our move to Blackboard Learn Ultra.
Blackboard Ally integrates into our Blackboard Learn Ultra environment and focuses on making digital content more accessible.
For colleagues creating content you will be able to amend the accessibility of your content. This means that your content will be more accessible to assistive technologies, such as screen readers.
Another benefit of Blackboard Ally is that content can be downloaded in multiple formats. This means that your lecture notes, PowerPoints, and other documents can be converted into many different formats, including:
There’s nothing that you need to do to enable Ally on your course. It will automatically be enabled on Monday 11 September on 2023-24 Courses onwards and Organisations.
For more information on using Blackboard Ally, take a look at our staff or student FAQ.
If you want to know further information about creating accessible learning materials, take a look at our resources.
Vevox, the University’s supported polling tool, has updated its PowerPoint Add-in.
From September 2023, colleagues making use of the Add-in should use the updated version.
Please see our FAQ for how to use the new PowerPoint Add-in.
In our recent blogpost, we wrote about the new AI question generator.
If Vevox is new to you then take a look at our support materials and our previous blogposts.
We’ve also got a training session taking place on Monday 18 September, 14:00-15:00. This session is run by colleagues from Vevox. Book your place online.
Vevox is a great way to make your teaching interactive and further student’s learning.
One of the benefits of moving to Blackboard Learn Ultra is the increased enhancements to the virtual learning environment.
In this blogpost, we will outline some of the new functionality available in this month’s update.
The location to manage the Groups feature has changed. You can now access this directly from the top menu of your course:
See groups guidance for additional information.
You can now add images to Learning Modules.
Learning Modules offer a way for you to organise your content. For further information, see Learning Modules guidance.
To ensure that your content is as accessible as possible, use the accessibility checker.
As you create your content, your accessibility score will be generated to alert you to any changes that you might want to make.
When it comes to grading tests, you can now grade by question or student in Ultra. See Blackboard’s test guidance and flex grading for further information.
For other updates this month, take a look at Blackboard’s Release notes.
If you’ve got any questions about using any of these features or Blackboard Learn Ultra, contact elearning@aber.ac.uk.
One of the great new enhancements that we’ve got in Blackboard Ultra is the ability to embed collaborative documents.
For those of us who did much of their teaching online during the Covid pandemic, you will recall us espousing the benefits of loading a collaborative document in the chat. We’ve now been working to enable this on our Blackboard Courses and we are pleased to say that they are available for you to use on your 2023-24 courses.
This means that your students will be able to collaborate together outside the classroom, on Blackboard in their own time. There are 3 types of document available for students to collaborate on:
We’re going to be using the collab docs for blog and wiki alternatives. But, if you want to maybe get your students to mind map, generate ideas, or build on each other’s notes, take a look at the collab docs. You could also use it to get students to sign up to groups. You can use the group feature in Ultra courses to limit the item to a specific student or group of students.
Want to know how to do it? Take a look at Blackboard’s guidance on Microsoft OneDrive and collaborative documents.
In summer 2022 we moved to a new version of Turnitin. As support for our previous version of Turnitin has now ceased, the historical version (known as Turnitin Building Block) will be retired on 31 August 2023.
This means that any marked assignments will no longer be accessible to staff and students.
Students should download any historical assignments (from pre-academic year 2022-23) and save them.
Staff should contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk) if they still need to access Turnitin assignments in the Building Block for marking purposes.
Even though access will be removed, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit will still be able to request marked assignments via Turnitin support. If you require this after 31 August 2023, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).