This is a repost of information about the Blackboard upgrades this summer

This summer we will have two upgrade periods scheduled for the Blackboard system. Students and staff will not be able to access shuspace and Blackboard sites during the upgrade periods. Please do not schedule teaching and learning activities in Blackboard during these times, such as online submission of assessments or inputting marks into Blackboard.

The first upgrade will be to update the hardware and operating system for Blackboard. This is to improve the performance of Blackboard and will be the weekend of 7-9 June. We expect the upgrade to start at 18:00 on Friday the 7th and last all day on Saturday the 8th. Blackboard should be considered at risk on Sunday the 9th though we anticipate it should be available to staff and students then.

The second upgrade will be an update to the Blackboard software to take advantage of new features and fixes it contains. This upgrade is scheduled for 12-14 July.  We expect the upgrade to start at 18:00 on Friday the 12th and be completed in less than 24 hours.

We know that there are some teaching programmes which will be affected by the downtime and we apologise for any inconvenience this causes. As always, the upgrade team will strive to minimise any downtime.  We hope by advertising these downtimes significantly in advance that activities can be rescheduled to reduce the amount of affected programmes and individuals.