Spring 2012 and Summer 2012 Blackboard Courses to be Archived

On Sept. 6, all Spring 2012 and Summer 2012 Blackboard courses will be removed from active status on Blackboard. Instructors, as well as students, will no longer have access to them after this date. However, backups were created of the course content for these courses, so course content can always be brought back with a quick call to the Faculty Center for Learning Development (FCLD) should the need arise.

The campus upgrade to Enterprise Blackboard made it possible to create all courses automatically each term. However, keeping all Blackboard courses active indefinitely can impact Blackboard’s performance. University guidelines for Blackboard state that instructors are granted access to one full year’s set of all their Blackboard courses. Course sites older than one year that are no longer used by instructors will be deactivated and removed from Blackboard approximately one year after the term in which they were used has ended.

Grades and other student-related data are not preserved in the backups so faculty should plan to print out or export any grades recorded in Blackboard’s Online Gradebook prior to Sept. 6. Instructors who would like permanent records of online discussions (forums), wikis/blogs/journals, submitted assignments, or Digital Dropbox submissions should plan to print these out or download them to their computers. If there is a reason for keeping a course available to students past this date (e.g., a student with an incomplete or a continuing online discussion), please let FCLD know.

Instructors with questions about Blackboard course deactivation or who would like assistance using Blackboard are encouraged to contact FCLD at 860.768.4661 or fcld@hartford.edu.