My Dundee Blog
Announcing the Integrated Video Project
In recent years, we have made significant gains in enhancing our video capabilities to better support student learning. From lecture capture and hybrid delivery to the production of rich asynchronous video content, the university has been committed to leveraging technology to improve the learning experience. However, we acknowledge that there is still much work to be done, and so i'm pleased to announce the launch of the Integrated Video Project. This initiative aims to build on our existing progress and take our video services to the next level, with a focus on producing a more capable and reliable service for ...
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Summary of My Dundee issues for April 2023
What happened? On 20 and 25 April, there were DNS issues affecting My Dundee and associated services. Due to the nature of DNS, what people experienced varied heavily. Some users would not have experienced any issues. Other users were not able to get into embedded tools such as Turnitin, and others were not able to open or download documents from My Dundee. When did it happen? On 25 April, Blackboard reported that these issues began at 08:15 BST and our ... read more
Issue accessing My Dundee and related tools (solution suggested)
Update (15:30 BST 27/04/2023): Blackboard have confirmed that their solution to this issue is in place and it has fixed the issue for the majority of our users at UoD. However, they have noted that due to the nature of DNS, it takes time for this solution to reach everyone and as a result some users are still experiencing access issues. If you are still seeing this issue, and have already tried flushing the DNS using the steps provided in ... read more
DNS issue affecting My Dundee and related tools
From approximately 10:30 BST today (20 April 2023), we had reports from some users who were unable to access Turnitin. We have confirmed that this is due to a global DNS error that Blackboard has reported on their status page. Although this is an issue that originate with Blackboard (My Dundee), it impacted related services that are linked in My Dundee, such as Turnitin. We have only received reports about Turnitin; however, any item that is added to a module ... read more
Briefing note on AI in education and assessment
Developments in the abilities and ease of access to Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are receiving extensive media coverage. The focus has largely been on ChatGPT, but there are hundreds of these tools and more recently Google released their own AI conversational chatbot, Bard. Similarly, there is extensive discussion across higher education about the impact that AI will have on learning, teaching and research as well as society at large. An early area of concern is the impact of AI on ... read more
New Course Role!
There is a new course role for members of staff called "Staff - Read-only". This is a role that you should only assign to members of staff. This is not a replacement of "Guest" and therefore should never be assigned to students. This role is very restricted in the view of the module, the actions the user can take in the module, and the user's access to external app tools (such as Turnitin). View: In the top tab, they can ... read more
Lecture Capture Fix Being Deployed
I am pleased to announce that our colleagues in DTS have completed a thorough investigation to address the unreliability issues that impacted lecture recordings this semester. A new version of the YuJa recording software is now being deployed, which promises to resolve the issues that were present in the previous one. Extensive testing has confirmed that the updated version of the software no longer suffers from any cut-outs of video or audio. While it is still too early to give ... read more
Accessing Turnitin as a student
We've seen some calls coming in to Help4U and had questions asked at the service desk about how to access Turnitin. We just wanted to make a quick post to remind all students that Turnitin is accessed solely from within My Dundee. If you have a Turnitin assignment for a module, you will find the submission point in your module in My Dundee. You don't need to do anything to set up an account - all of this is done ... read more
Ongoing Reliability Issues with Lecture Capture
Users have continued to experience reliability issues when recording lectures using the YuJa video software. The project team is continuing to work with the vendor to isolate and resolve these issues but read on to find out more about what's happening, how we're working to find a resolution and what steps we're taking to secure long term stability of the service. Key Points: The reliability of the lecture capture process has continued to be an issue throughout this semester, impacting ... read more
Turnitin issue on 5 and 6 February
On February 5, Turnitin reported a service incident that entirely prevented users from accessing Turnitin. They marked this as resolved that day, but we recieved several reports from a variety of users on the morning of Monday the 6th that there were still on-going issues. According to our internal records, this seems to have been resolved by 12:45 GMT ... read more
Focus On Accessibility 20 – 24 Feb
During the Week beginning 20th Feb, we will be running a week of events to help support our teaching community develop their understanding around accessibility requirements and the skills to create more accessible content ... read more
