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Blackboard annual upgrade this August

25 Jun 2020

Advanced notice: Blackboard will be unavailable from Tuesday 4 August (17:00 BST) to Monday 10 August (09:00 BST) due to a planned annual upgrade.

Blackboard image

The annual upgrade of Blackboard is planned to take place this August. 

Access to Blackboard and its in-built tools, including Turnitin and Grademark, will be unavailable for all staff and students while the upgrade takes place.

The upgrade window is slightly longer than in previous years because we are also moving our managed hosted instance of Blackboard to a new cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) hosting environment. This provides many benefits including the ability for future updates to be applied without any interruption of service (downtime) – a welcome benefit for all.

The essential upgrade will improve current functionality, incorporate security enhancements, performance improvements and bug fixes. 

While a great deal of work is currently taking place, including performance testing of the new hosting environment, we are on track to be able to confirm the change during the week commencing 6 July, after which we will publish more information. 

Contact your eLearning team if you have any questions at this time.