Academic Technology, Blackboard, Faculty/Staff

Blackboard – end of semester reminders

Here are some important tips for managing course availability, preserving seniors’ data and more. Note that a maintenance outage is planned for August.

Graduating seniors will lose Blackboard access — back up now to preserve student data!

Students lose their Blackboard account during the summer (mid-June) after they graduate.  Not only will they be unable to log in, uploaded files (assignments) and grades will be permanently deleted from their Bb past courses and organizations.  ITS saves an archive of all Bb sites each semester, but we may not capture every site at the right moment to guarantee recovery of individual student items.

If the loss of student contributions to your Blackboard sites is of concern to you, please consider backing up individual items, or form a personal archive of your Blackboard sites before the accounts of graduating seniors are dropped.  You can download your own archive to your computer.  Go to

Control Panel > Course Archive

[ more tips on saving a Bb archive: http://tinyurl.com/ytglqx ]
[ more tips on exporting discussion board: http://tinyurl.com/5etv9w ]

Making past semester courses unavailable to students

Student access to Blackboard courses depends on the ‘course availability’ setting in your Blackboard control panel.  Unless there are ongoing reasons for keeping your Spring 08 and older courses open to students, it’s a good idea to make them unavailable.

Control Panel > Settings > Course Availability = NO

Planned Blackboard maintenance outages in July

This summer, we will perform some maintenance on our Tri-College Blackboard system.  This work is tentatively scheduled for the week of August 11.  We will provide details soon about changes and new features you may be interested in trying after the updates, as well as some training opportunities.

If you have any questions, please contact your usual Blackboard support person.