Various issues related to the Portal were recently reported in The Varsity. Here’s a link to the article fyi: Out of Order: Outages, maintenance plaque Blackboard during exam season http://thevarsity.ca/2015/01/12/out-of-order/  

This is just a quick reminder that ITS has enabled a new System Status service where members of the UofT community can go and check on the status of enterprise services. You can also subscribe to regular alerts for your favourite services from the website: http://www.systemstatus.utoronto.ca/

A few days ago, several UofT services became sluggish or unresponsive, including our Learning Portal (aka Blackboard LMS). It turns out that a network downstream from the university had started blocking Google Analytics, and websites that use this service started to slow down as installed plugins tried to ‘call home’ to the ‘mothership’. Of course, … Read More

We have become aware that some instructors are sharing non-UofT online resources with students, and that in a select few cases, these sites have been taken over by hackers and phishers, who nefariously use those non-UofT sites to collect information from unsuspecting students who believe the sites are legitimate learning resources assigned by instructors. Instructors … Read More

The Turnitin Direct Assignment tool that is integrated in Portal courses will be discontinued as of Friday, May 9, 2014. We have encountered a technical difficulty with the tool that is causing interference with the overall functionality of the Portal. To avoid disruptions to the smooth functioning of the learning management system, we are disabling … Read More

As many of you know, many students who logged in to the Portal early on Sunday, April 6, couldn’t find their course websites. The Portal (known to some as Blackboard) was actually functioning perfectly. Unfortunately a glitch on another system was responsible for the ‘absent’ courses. Once the Portal support team figured that out, we … Read More

MEMO From: Avi Hyman, Director, ACT Date: April 4, 2014: 00:20 Re: Update on Exchange Issue on April 3 First, I want to thank everyone in the community who participated in troubleshooting the earlier Exchange issue. I also want to thank those who helped with patron communications. It was, as usual, a community effort. As … Read More

MEMO April 3, 2014 Re: Portal Status Update From:  Avi Hyman, Director, ACT http://uoft.me/act As many of you will note, the Portal returned to improved service after 01:00 this morning thanks to the efforts of our extended team. We are now pursuing a strong hypothesis that the load on a particular piece of software was … Read More

MEMO Re: Portal Status Date: April 2, 2014 Time: 6:00 pm From: Avi Hyman, Director, Academic & Collaborative Technologies As you may know, the Portal has been very sluggish today. First and foremost, I would like to apologize for any disruption to people’s work that has occurred as a result of the problems, especially at … Read More

The Portal will be upgraded to the most recent version of the Blackboard Learn software on May 10th and 11th, 2014. The new version will include a number of new features as well as enhancements to existing tools and capabilities. Additional information will be shared as documentation is completed over the upcoming weeks. 
Please note … Read More