All courses offered two years prior to any running semester will be archived and removed from UMass Amherst's Blackboard Learn production environment. This is a necessary maintenance process that will remove inactive courses to free up storage space and improve the overall performance of the learning management system.

Schedule & Rationale

The course retention procedure will allow instructors to retain access to their running course, as well as all of their courses that preceded it up to two academic years prior. In the case of a course offered biennially (i.e. Spring 2018 and 2020), the instructor will retain access to the older section(s) until the end of the Add/Drop period of the running semester. This allows instructors ample time between the scheduling of their courses in SPIRE and the end of the Add/Drop period to configure their Blackboard course shells with the proper content.

*Some removal dates may be affected (delayed) pending the availability of archives

Concerns

What will be removed?

All records and content associated with the course will be removed from Blackboard. However, please note that none of your data will be permanently deleted. Archives of your courses, containing all content and data, are procedurally generated after the end of each semester.

Archived copies of your courses are stored both locally by the Blackboard Instructional Technologist team and by our host, UMassOnline.

Furthermore, some content may either be manually exported by the instructor or provided by Instructional Technologists upon request. For information on what data can be retained, please refer to the table below:

Type of export:	Data Included:	Data excluded:	Instructions:
Grade Center	A complete record of a course’s Grade Center compiled in .xls or .csv format.	All course content.	Download grade center columns
Course Files	A package of every file uploaded to the course shell.	All Blackboard tool interactions (discussions, assignments, tests), student roster and data.	Download Your Course Files
Backup	All of the course's content compiled and exported in a .zip file package.	Student roster and data.	Contact Instructional Technologists at elearning@uww.umass.edu.
Archive	All of the course’s content, including student data, compiled in an archive package.	-	Contact Instructional Technologists at elearning@uww.umass.edu.

Are incompletes affected?

Any course in which a student is actively fulfilling an incomplete will not be removed from the system until the incomplete access closes. The course will then be added to the removal queue for the following semester.

What about grade challenges?

In the event a grade challenge arises for a removed course and an instructor does not have a downloaded copy of the Gradecenter, Instructional Technologists can restore your course to the Blackboard Learn environment in order to retrieve specific data.

For questions regarding the Blackboard Learn Course Retention Policy, please contact the Blackboard Instructional Technologists at elearning@oe.umass.edu.

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