Recently there has been an increased number of queries from students receiving erroneous notifications for overdue assignments. This post will provide an explanation as to what's happened and why.
Two changes have happened recently that have led to some confusion. Firstly Blackboard's (MOLE’s) notification digests have an improved design, and while they give the same information, they are significantly easier to read and seem to be being read more consistently by learners. Secondly an upgrade to the Turnitin building block (the software that enables Turnitin to talk to Blackboard) now means Turnitin due dates trigger notifications in Blackboard, which they didn't previously.
We are exploring with Blackboard and Turnitin to clarify the cause of these overdue notifications but at present we believe there are two main reasons.
The first possible reason for this is when multiple Turnitin submission points are set up in a Blackboard course. An example of this is when different students are required to submit on different dates (perhaps due to a staggered deadline for different groups or extensions for certain students). The issue here is, as the Blackboard grade centre doesn't know which students on the course should be using which submission points, it will send overdue notices to those submission points the students aren't meant to be using. (For example if a student submits to Submission A, and Submission B is a later submission point for extenuating circumstances for other students, they will still receive an overdue notice for not submitting to it).
The second reason we believe may be related to courses which have a Turnitin assignment with anonymous marking enabled. When this option is enabled it doesn’t give a “needs marking” status in the Grade Centre, therefore Blackboard may push out notifications thinking there has been no submission attempt made.
After the changes to MOLE happening in the summer, all users will have much more granular control over the notifications they receive.
If you have had instances of this in your course and could share with us how the assignment is set up please let us know at digital.learning@sheffield.ac.uk as this will help to find a pattern of the triggers of notifications.
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