Course Archive and Removal Schedule

From BbWiki

The Tri-college Blackboard team has developed the following policies to manage archiving and removal of older courses from Blackboard.

SUMMARY: Academic courses are archived and removed from Blackboard after four semesters. Course can be kept active or restored upon request.

Academic courses are created during the mid-term break preceding their use. Courses remain on the server (available or unavailable as determined by instructor) for four semesters after they're created. After four semesters, courses are archived during the mid-semester break and then removed from the server. For example, Spring 2008 courses were created during the Fall 2007 break and will be deleted during the Spring 2010 break.

Summary of the academic course life cycle:

Courses are created on (or shortly after) prior mid-semester break
Semester 1 (typically the main semester of use)
Semester 2
Semester 3
Semester 4 - Remove on mid-semester break

A complete archive of each course is formed just before a course is removed, and can be used to restore the course if needed. At the request of a faculty member, course(s) scheduled for removal can be exempted.

Copies of each schools archives by semester are kept at Swarthmore, and also distributed to each school's Blackboard administrator. If a course is removed, it can be later be brought back onto the system from the archive file. This must be done by a Blackboard system administrator at your school.

Note that instructors may want to form additional archives of their courses to allow a full restore of user-specific information at the time the course is given. This is discussed more fully in the article When a student account is deleted from Bb, their grade information and uploads are dropped.

NON-ACADEMIC COURSES

The above schedule applies only to academic courses created by the automated snapshot process. Manually created courses and Blackboard organizations have no set schedule of removal.