We have not had any further reports of the issues experienced by some of our students on Tuesday 12 Jan. As always, if students do have issues submitting, please contact the IT Service desk to report the issue.
Comments are welcome, however if you need help or advice please contact the IT Service Desk on tel (0113) 343 3333, via the online contact form, or itservicedesk@leeds.ac.uk.
We are receiving reports from students who are having problems submitting to Turnitin.
Turnitin have advised:
“We have been made aware that a number of users are experiencing intermittent issues whilst trying to use Turnitin. This is an ongoing issue affecting a large number of companies/services across the internet and is not specific to Turnitin.”
If a submission fails, please try again. If the problem continues, please report to the IT Service Desk and if you are concerned that you will miss a deadline, please contact your School.
Comments are welcome, however if you need help or advice please contact the IT Service Desk on tel (0113) 343 3333, via the online contact form, or itservicedesk@leeds.ac.uk.
Due to essential maintenance, we are planning to upgrade Minerva in late January. To reduce the impact on staff and students, the work will take place over a weekend. The work is planned to take place from late Friday, 29th January until late Saturday, 30 January.
This is dependent on work being completed by colleagues in IT. Once the schedule has been finalised, we will post an update confirming the exact times.
During this maintenance Minerva will not be available and you won’t have access to content. Access to other University systems, such as Outlook, OneDrive and Student/Faculty Services, will be unaffected.
Flash is Adobe software which is used to create interactive software. Adobe will end support for Flash at the end of 2020. All mainstream web browsers (e.g. Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge) are expected to end support for Flash by the end of 2020.
If you have learning resources which use Flash, they will no longer work after Dec 2020. At the University we typically see Flash being used in interactive presentations built with older versions of Articulate, however, other old software produces resources using Flash.
The simplest way to test this is to make sure Flash is not on by default in your web browser and then try and open the resource.
For Chrome:
Settings.If there is Flash in your resource you will either be prompted to enable Adobe Flash Player or you will see an icon next to the URL in your web browser indicating that Flash has been blocked, if you click on the icon you will see this message:
Any resource using Flash will need to be rebuilt before 2021 at the latest. Modern software should offer the option to publish using HTML5 which is supported by all mainstream web browsers.
Turnitin have now implemented a fix. They report that users may experience slowness while using the service as the system recovers.
Turnitin is experiencing an unexpected service disruption.
This issue is affecting all Turnitin institutions and their engineers are looking into the issues as a priority. You can check for updates on the service status page: https://turnitin.statuspage.io/
Some users may have experienced an interruption to service this afternoon, approx 12:30-13:05. Our suppliers implemented a fix shortly after 13:00 and continue to monitor the service.
Apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Comments are welcome, however if you need help or advice please contact the IT Service Desk on tel (0113) 343 3333, via the online contact form, or itservicedesk@leeds.ac.uk.
This issue has now been resolved and users should be able to join sessions. Apologies for the inconvenience caused.
Some users may currently experience a 500 error when trying to join a session. Blackboard are investigating this issue as a matter of urgency.
Updates are available here: https://status.blackboard.com/
Google Chrome users are currently experiencing an issue viewing PDFs in the built in Chrome PDF viewer.
Typically, the first page of the PDF will display, followed by a series of grey dots representing missing pages OR users will be shown a login box.
The Built in Chrome PDF viewer showing missing pages
There is a workaround: Use another supported browser (Safari, Firefox, Edge).
Or
The PDFs will then download, and you can open the file in the preferred viewer on your computer.
Learning Technologies Team
