News and Announcements

Blackboard Collaborate Ultra (Recordings) - Course Media ingestion failure 05/04/21 [Resolved]

Posted: 2021-05-04 10:52:09   Expiration: 2021-05-20 10:52:09

Disclaimer: This news item was originally posted on 2021-05-04 10:52:09. Its content may no longer be timely or accurate.

The Course Media ingestion process for automatically transferring Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings to Kaltura encountered an error at approximately 7:50 AM on Tuesday 05/04/2021. Approximately 1,000 Collaborate Ultra recordings from all UW institutions (including UW Madison) failed to copy to Kaltura. The creation dates of the recordings appear to range from 04/29 to 05/04/21.

The UWSA Digital Learning Environment (DLE) team has paused the nightly Course Media ingestion process until we can determine the cause of the problem and come up with a solution. We will provide updates here as they are available.

For more information about Course Media exports, see Blackboard Collaborate Ultra (Recordings) - Media Management Process. 

Update 05/05/21

The DLE Team has determined that the issue may be related to a recent Kaltura deployment making unannounced changes to the "Upload from a URL" feature. The DLE Team is working with Kaltura Support to confirm this hypothesis and to restore functionality. We do not have an ETA for the fix.

While users are waiting for automated Kaltura imports to resume, they can access course-related Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings by going to Canvas > [course] > Collaborate Ultra > Menu > Recordings. According to the Media Management process, Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings made in Canvas will remain on Blackboard’s servers for 45 days.

Resolved 05/19/21

Kaltura has released a hotfix to restore functionality to the automated tool that UW System is using to transfer Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings to Kaltura. The automated tool has processed all past recordings, and the Media Management process is back to working as intended, with two exceptions:

  1. The Digital Learning Environment Team is cleaning up duplicates of recordings which threw errors on May 4. Fresh, fully-functional copies of those recordings were migrated on 05/18/21, and the new, error-free copies should be used.
  2. The DLE Team has temporarily modified the Media Management process so that Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings are deleted from Blackboard's servers after 60 days (instead of 45 days) in order to give a bit more time for cleanup.


-- UWSA DLE: Thomas Arendalkowski