Blackboard Issue Alerts – Blank Assignment Submissions/Empty Journal and Blog Entries

Contributed by Jenn Ray and Samantha Houston, Learning Technology Administrator I

Blackboard can produce some odd and often unpredictable errors that are the result of specific incompatibilities between Blackboard Learn and popular web browsers (e.g., Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari). In this week's article, we'll describe the most commonly seen browser-related problems in Blackboard.

Blank Assignment Files

• If your student has submitted a blank document:
• It is likely the result of a known issue but can also happen if the file is still open on the computer.
• Check the student’s submission receipt for a file size of 0 bytes

We often get students reporting that the document they uploaded was submitted blank, but the file on their computer is fine. The most common cause of this is that the student is using Microsoft Edge as their browser. This is a known issue with Edge, and Blackboard has made Microsoft aware of it. Unfortunately, the fix has to come from Microsoft, so there isn’t anything Blackboard can do. This does not happen every time when submitting with Edge, so some students may have used it successfully for months or longer before experiencing this issue. A blank submission can also occur if the student still has the document open when attaching it before submitting it. To troubleshoot this, you can check the student’s submission receipt for that particular assignment.

Some instructors have expressed concern that a student may have submitted a blank file on purpose to buy time. Submission Receipts are the way to check for this. Every assignment submission has an associated submission receipt. These are emailed to the student when the assignment is submitted successfully, and instructors will have access to all submission receipts for all student assignment submissions in each course. To find the submission receipt for any student assignment submission, begin by going to your full grade center. On the main page, click Reports, then select Submission Receipts from the menu. On the next page, type in the username for the student in question and click go. A list of all submission receipts for that student for the course will populate. Locate the assignment and then check the size column. If you see a size of 0 bytes, then there was most likely an issue with the submission. If a student has submitted a purposefully blank document, it will still have some background data that would give the file a size greater than 0.

Empty Journal and Blog Entries

Several months ago, we first began experiencing an issue in Blackboard where posts such as Journals or Blogs were being submitted blank, despite text being entered in the text editor. The issue was mostly confined to Mac users using Safari as their browser but did also creep into Chrome users as well. The issue was resolved by updating the browser to the most current version. Lately this issue has been popping up again in other locations, such as in essay questions during an exam. In the coming semester, if you have students reporting this issue, be advised that while there is no way for us to recover the work, having the student update the browser they’re using should resolve the issue in the future. As we discussed in our article covering the “best” browser for Blackboard, currently we recommend using an up-to-date version of Mozilla Firefox. However, this may change as browsers will occasionally update more rapidly than Blackboard can keep up with.