As originally announced in our March 15, 2020 newsletter, our team will remove all 2017 Blackboard semester offerings during the week of May 3, 2021. In order to reduce the size of our Blackboard database (and to avoid incurring additional storage space costs from Blackboard), we retain three calendar years plus the current year at any given time, so it is now time to say goodbye to 2017 shells. Course shells to be deleted are only those that have SP17, SU17, and FA17 in their CourseID. We have already restored faculty access to their 2017 semester offerings so that you can review those courses and decide whether or not you want to retain an offline copy for your records. Faculty who would like to retain copies of their 2017 courses may use either the Archive or Export option in Blackboard to do so. The difference between the archive and export process, as provided by Blackboard, is as follows:
- The archive course feature creates a frozen snapshot or permanent record of your course. An archive includes all the content, course statistics, users, and course interactions, such as blog posts, discussions, attendance data, and grades.
- The export course feature creates a ZIP file of your course content that you can import to create a new course. Unlike the archive course feature, the export course feature doesn't include any users or user interactions with the course.
Please note that neither process results in a version of your course contents that you can access or use outside of Blackboard. You may import a Blackboard export file to load old contents into a new blank semester shell. To access an archived file, you would need to work with our Learning Technology Administrators (LTAs) to temporarily restore a shell from that file to access materials or data. UCT will not be retaining any copies of 2017 course shells, so please make plans to export or archive courses that you want to save before Monday, May 3, 2021.
