On Behalf of Digital Education: Blackboard Upgrade 2019

Blackboard will be upgraded week commencing 8th July 2019. Throughout the upgrade there will be a read-only version of Blackboard available from 6th July 2019. Staff and students will be able to access Blackboard in the usual way, however any changes made to sites or content on the read-only version will not be retained when the upgraded version of Blackboard is made available. The upgrade will be completed within the working week and will become available following successful internal testing.

What to expect from the upgrade?

The new version comes with ‘under-the-hood’ improvements and a simplified login process.

Please note, from July Blackboard will no longer support the IE11 browser. This does not mean it will stop working completely, but it cannot be relied upon to work exactly as expected. Any identified issues with IE11, will be made available on the ‘Known Issues’ tab within Blackboard. As the University will be upgrading University PCs to the Windows 10 operating system for the end of the year, the IE11 browser will subsequently disappear from all University PCs. As a result, we recommend moving to Chrome as the default browser for Blackboard.

Whilst not an issue on Windows 10, Chrome will currently prevent users opening the browser on two different PCs; such as an office and a lecture theatre. As a result, when using Chrome, please remember to close your browser if you wish to open it in another location.  If this issue does occur before the Windows 10 upgrade is completed, IE11 will still be available, but of course cannot be relied upon to work exactly as expected.

If you have any questions about the upgrade, please email digitaleducation@lincoln.ac.uk.