OIT's Technology Learning Services team will delete 2018 and 2019 Blackboard semester offerings on Friday, May 27, 2022. In addition to this newsletter article, multiple emails from the IDT team to faculty will be sent beginning Wednesday, April 27. Periodic course deletions are needed to reduce the size of our Blackboard database (and to avoid incurring additional storage space costs from Blackboard).
Course shells to be deleted are only those that have SP18, SU18, FA18, SP19, SU19, and FA19 in their CourseIDs. Our team's Learning Technology Administrators (LTAs) will restore faculty access to their 2018 and 2019 semester offerings this week 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 2018 and 2019 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.
