William & Mary
Close menu Resources for... William & Mary
Popular Topics
Suggested Results
News Events
Apply Visit Request Info
W&M menu close William & Mary
Information Technology

Blackboard Courses from 2020 to be Archived on 5/17

Summary

Export or archive your Blackboard courses from Spring and Fall 2020 to maintain readily available access to them.

Full Description

We are quickly approaching our storage capacity limits in Blackboard! To address this issue, academic courses within Blackboard from the Spring and Fall 2020 semesters will be archived. This archive process will take place on May 17, 2023.

For faculty, the archived courses will still be retrievable, but will require a request to Blackboard which may take time to process. We recommend making your own archived or exported copy of your courses for easy access and to save time. For students, we recommend saving files individually from courses. 

The Blackboard archive process will impact academic courses only. Dossiers and non-academic courses will not be impacted at this time.  

For Faculty: Export/Archive Instructions

An archive copy of a course provides a snapshot of the course (including student data and grades). Follow these instructions on How to Archive your Blackboard Course (pdf).

An exported copy of the course does not include student data, but provides a copy of the content that can be imported back into Blackboard for a future course. Follow the Blackboard instructions for exporting your course.

Important! If you plan to import your course into Blackboard, do not open the downloaded .zip file from the export process as it may corrupt the data. Make a duplicate copy prior to opening and/or download two versions of the .zip file, if you anticipate the need to open the export. 

Moving Forward

W&M IT is currently working with STLI to develop best practices for Blackboard usage. In the meantime, the following steps can help keep storage capacity issues at bay:

  • Utilize Panopto storage for Zoom video recordings, instead of Blackboard.
  • Link to the video recordings stored in other cloud storage systems (YouTube, Google Drive, Panopto, etc.) instead of uploading the videos directly to Blackboard.
  • Have students submit video assignments on other available storage platforms (like Google Drive or Panopto). 

To help ensure storage availability in the future, W&M will only retain academic Blackboard courses less than two years old.  At the end of every semester going forward (fall, spring, and summer), Blackboard courses two years old and older will be archived by Blackboard. 

Questions? Contact the Technology Support Center (TSC)
757-221-4357 (HELP) | [[support]] | Monday - Friday, 8:00 am - 5:00 pm