Minerva will be unavailable for approximately 1 minute on Friday 7th January at 3am (GMT) for essential maintenance. We have been in discussion with the vendor who recommended this short downtime period which is required to apply a change that will increase capacity. This is in preparation for the up and coming January assessment period when it is expected that staff and students will be making increased use of the service.
Taught Student Education Board has approved the removal of all modules where the taught academic year ended 7 or more years ago (2008/09 to 2013/14 inclusive). This is because despite recently more than doubling the storage in Minerva, we are still at 98% of the storage capacity. We will permanently delete these modules from Minerva which will reduce the amount of storage used by up to 6%. This work will be completed w/c 7th February 2022.
Going forward a formal retention policy is planned and will be communicated once finalised.
What’s happening?
LinkedIn Learning will be unavailable using your Leeds University account while we update one of our systems.
When is it happening?
10:00-17:00 Thursday 16 December
How will it affect me?
You won’t be able to access LinkedIn Learning during this time.
Digital Education Systems Team
We have had reports from some users of 404 or resource not found errors when opening files on Minerva.
We have escalated the issues to our supplier for urgent action.
If you are seeing a 404 error when using the Microsoft Edge browser, or the message “Sorry, there was a problem and we can’t open this document. If this happens again, try opening the Document in Microsoft Word”, a workaround is to change the behaviour in Edge to download the file(s).
This is a sporadic issue where changing the web browser may resolve the issue, an alternative workaround is to download the file(s) using Ally.
To download alternative formats with Ally click the Ally icon and a new window opens, this shows you the choice of alternative formats for that file. Select what you want and click Download.
Detailed guidance on Ally alternative formats can be found on the Digital Education Systems help website.
If you are impacted by this please click on ‘I’m affected’ via the IT Service Status page to log an incident with the IT Service Desk (you will need to log in).
Apologies for any disruption caused.
What’s happening?
We have had reports from some users of 404 or resource not found errors when opening files on Minerva. Switching browser may resolve the issue.
What are we doing about it?
We have escalated this issue to our supplier for urgent action.
A workaround is to download the file(s) using Ally.
To download alternative formats with Ally click the Ally icon and a new window opens, this shows you the choice of alternative formats for that file. Select what you want and click Download.
Detailed guidance on Ally alternative formats can be found on the Digital Education Systems help website.
If you are impacted by this please click on ‘I’m affected’ via the IT Service Status page to log an incident with the IT Service Desk (you will need to log in).
Apologies for any disruption caused.
What’s happening?
We have had reports from some users of 404 errors when opening files on Minerva. Switching browser may resolve the issue.
What are we doing about it?
We have escalated this issue to our supplier for urgent action.
If you are impacted by this please click on ‘I’m affected’ via the IT Service Status page to log an incident with the IT Service Desk (you will need to log in).
Apologies for any disruption caused.
The issue was resolved on Friday 12th November at 15:55. Scheduled maintenance on the evening of Thursday 11th November resulted in an issue with our custom University of Leeds language locale which triggered the issue, this has been rectified. Staff and students can now post to module and organisation discussion boards in Minerva.
Please accept our apologies for the disruption this may have caused.
What’s happening?
An issue has been identified with the scheduled Minerva system maintenance which took place on the evening of Thursday 11th November. Staff and students are currently unable to post to Minerva discussion boards in modules and organisations and will see in a blank page with the error message “An error occurred loading a message reply, please try reloading the page.”
Who is it affecting?
All staff and students with modules or organisations using the discussion board tool.
What are we doing about it?
We have reported the issue to the vendor who are working on providing a resolution as soon as possible.
If you are impacted by this please click on ‘I’m affected’ via the IT Service Status page to log an incident with the IT Service Desk.
The new Digital Education Systems Help website has now officially launched. The site, which can be reached at https://desystemshelp.leeds.ac.uk, provides task-oriented help and guidance for staff and students on the use of digital learning and teaching systems and virtual classroom solutions, including Minerva, PebblePad, Turnitin and Collaborate Ultra. Step-by-step guides, introductory videos and FAQs are included, along with news updates and information on training courses and events for the current academic year. New content will be added to the website on a regular basis.
Technical support is also offered through the University IT Service (https://it.leeds.ac.uk/it) while guidance on teaching best practice can be found on the Digital Practice website (https://digitalpractice.leeds.ac.uk/).
We have moved to an updated version of Gradescope, which means that instructors are now able create direct links to assignments.
The benefit of linking to an assignment directly is that a column within the Grade Centre is created automatically, and that the due date will show in the activity stream for students. Students will also be taken directly to the relevant assignment, rather than seeing the Gradescope dashboard.
While the initial set up will remain the same, the update will mean a slight change to how assignments are added to your module. You will now see an option under Add Content for a Gradescope Assignment. This will create a direct link to a specific assignment, rather than the Gradescope dashboard. Please see our guides for full instructions.
IMPORTANT: If you have already created and linked your Gradescope course to Minerva for any 21/22 modules, please be aware that this update will have broken this link. To rectify this, click on a Gradescope link within the module. The following box will appear:
Select to link with ‘an existing Gradescope course’ and choose the correct course from Gradescope. Please note that no work will have been lost, as this is stored within Gradescope.
Gradescope links in modules for previous academic years will also need to be re-linked, if still in use.
Creating direct links to existing assignments
If you have already started creating assignments for 21/22, you can still create a direct link for these. Please see the bottom section of the Setting up your Gradescope course guide.
Known issue with Safari
When using Safari and Gradescope, both staff and student users may find that the assignment link fails to load, and gets stuck on the following screen:
This is due to the default third party cookie settings in Safari blocking the integration. This can be easily changed by going to Safari > Preferences > Privacy and unticking the Prevent cross-site tracking box.
Alternatively, use another browser such as Chrome or Firefox to access Gradescope.
We have updated the student guides for Gradescope, which includes a troubleshooting guide. This guide explains the above workaround.
Minerva News 