Course Archiving

Course archiving will continue at the end of each term since Blackboard will only house the last 24 months of live course content on the hosted server on a rolling basis. We will help you save your content!  We do not delete Development courses that have had instructor interactions within the past 36 months.

After April 1, 2022, we will only retrieve old live sections in case of accreditation needs or long-lasting grade appeals. You can also export an Excel file of the Grade Center from old courses by going to Full Grade Center, scrolling over the Work Offline tab, and clicking Download.

Please read our FAQs for instructions on saving your own course.  The archival of previously live courses is a process that will be maintained. We are a managed hosted institution and must ensure that we do not exceed allotted space. Blackboard is also not a repository for information, so there are many years of live course sections that we must backup, archive, and remove from their server. Online Learning and IT will assist in archiving courses from on a scheduled basis. Important Note: It is not Marshall University or Blackboard’s policy to destroy course data or files. We are simply archiving older sections of courses and moving them to external hard drives to free up our server space and stay in line with University policy of archiving course sections that are older than two years. IT will maintain a copy of the archived course sections for 24 months after the time the course was archived, according to university records management policies.

2023-24 Archiving Schedule

 

 

 

Course Archiving FAQs

For every type of Blackboard course you use, ensure that you have a Development section for it that is current and reflects your updated content.
No. We are only archiving past live course sections.
No. This is why we are asking you to have an updated Development course for each class you teach.
Absolutely. We recognize that you deliver content differently. Please specify this information when you request Development courses.
You can save any course section and keep it on your own drive. Please see the Blackboard Help site for Exporting and Archiving Courses for instructions. If you would like to keep back copies of your live courses, we recommend you start a habit of backing up and saving your courses at the end of each semester.
Yes. Course archiving will continue on a rolling basis, per the archiving schedule.
There are several…A few benefits we will see immediately are:

1. The addition of free space on the servers that house Blackboard courses. This can increase Blackboard’s functionality and speed.

2. We are asking faculty to stop copying their old live sections into their new live sections and instead copy from a development course. If we keep copying course-to-course-to-course, eventually your course will break because with every copy it brings along a FULL set of copies of files and data. Copy from Development sections and you can ready your course for the next semester before the live course is even available!

3. We are committed to making all course content in Blackboard accessible to all students, and we can do this with Blackboard Ally. Having a development section that can be updated and made accessible is the start to making all content available to students from all walks of life.

4. Having less material on our server space will allow us to update Blackboard more frequently with less downtime and easier “fixes” to those known technical issues.

5. One of the biggest reasons is COST. Web-hosting is expensive and we regularly exceed our course size limits. Marshall is charged for storage we exceed outside our negotiated amount of space..

Step 1: Check to make sure you have Development courses for courses with any Blackboard content.

Step 2: If you do not have a Development section but would like one, please figure out which of your sections you would like us to copy INTO the Development section. Please click here to submit a request for your archived course content to be copied into a development section: Course Development Form If you have questions, please contact the Instructional Design Center at OnlineLearning@marshall.edu.

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