Trinity announced this evening that the apparent disappearance of modules from students’ Blackboard portals has been fixed.
In an email statement to The University Times Dr Geoff Bradley, the acting director of IT Services, said that, after being notified about the issue today, “a team of IT Services staff were quickly mobilised and engaged in investigating the issue. Blackboard were contacted immediately and have been on stand-by to assist us, if necessary, this afternoon”.
At 3.15pm, he said, IT Services decided on a fix to resolve the issue, and this fix was successfully implemented, with all modules accessible since 5pm.
The modules impacted by the issue were all semester one modules from this academic year.
Yesterday, students began to notice that some of the modules that they were studying for had disappeared from their Blackboard portals.
“Throughout the afternoon”, Bradley said, “we have published updates to the IT Services Website, twitter and to the Institutional [Announcements] in Blackboard to advise any many students as possible that we were aware of, and actively working to resolve, the issue”.
“Work will continue to establish why the issue occurred and the incident will remain open until the cause is fully understood.”
“We acknowledge this is a stressful time for students and apologise for the inconvenience caused for everyone.”
In a statement to The University Times, Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union Education Officer Megan O’Connor said: “There was an issue with a significant number of modules across all three faculties in Blackboard where students access was disabled on Saturday. It was brought to colleges and my attention earlier today and has thankfully since been resolved.”
“IT Services are currently investigating the cause. If any student has been impacted by this, particularly those with deadlines early this week please each out to your module leader, course coordinator or tutor for an extension or as always, feel free to contact me at [email protected].”
The final week of teaching ended last week, and students now look ahead to the revision period before exams.
Second semester exams will take place for two weeks, between May 10th and 24th, and deferred semester one exams will take place after those.
For the second year in a row, exams will take place online due to coronavirus restrictions.
College this year allowed students to defer their semester one exams or essays due as part of the assessment period without providing a reason, and third and fourth years were able to resit their semester one exams if they counted towards their final degree mark even if they have achieved a passing mark in the module.
Students can also apply to resit semester-two exams after results are released in June. Students can defer any or all semester-two exams, but will not be given a second chance to resit them, as they were allowed to do in semester one.
