This is a reminder about this summer’s two upgrade periods for the Blackboard system: 12-14 July 2013 and 26-28 July 2013. It is also a repost of earlier information.
Upgrade key points:
| Upgrade type | When | What changes |
| Blackboard hardware | From 6pm Friday 12th and all day Saturday 13th July (at risk Sunday 14th) |
No changes to Blackboard functionality |
| Blackboard software upgrade | From 6pm Friday 26th and all day Saturday 27th July (at risk Sunday 28th) |
New features and fixes in Blackboard |
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.
You may be aware that an earlier June upgrade of hardware and operating system had to be postponed. We have rescheduled this work for the weekend of 12-14 July (when the second Blackboard upgrade period was previously scheduled). We expect the upgrade to start at 6pm on Friday 12th and last all day on Saturday 13th. Blackboard should be considered at risk on Sunday 14th though we anticipate it should be available to staff and students then. This upgrade will not make changes to the functionality of Blackboard but is to improve performance.
The second upgrade will be an update to the Blackboard software to take advantage of new features and fixes it contains. This upgrade is now been moved to 26-28 July. We expect the upgrade to start at 6pm on Friday 26th and be completed in less than 24 hours. Blackboard should be considered at risk on Sunday 28th. We apologise that we have not been able to advertise the 26-28 July dates as early as we might have hoped due to the rescheduling.
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.