Blackboard Data Retention Initiative – Back Up Your Courses

With growth in LMS usage continuing to trend upwards at Humber College, the College will be initiating their Blackboard Data Retention Initiative this semester (Fall 2019). This initiative is sponsored and supported by ITS, AOC and the Teaching & Learning Support services.

Who will be impacted?

  • All faculty and administrators who have courses in Blackboard, pre-Fall 2017, will be impacted.

Which Blackboard courses will be archived and deleted?

  • All Banner generated courses, courses that have an assigned CRN number, including XL/cross listed courses, from Fall 2012 to Summer 2017 inclusive will be archived and then fully deleted from Blackboard.
  • .DEV, _DEV, SBX, TUTR, Master/MSTR and other specially requested Blackboard courses will not be archived nor deleted. Faculty can contact naveed.aqeel@humber.ca if they have questions regarding which courses will be impacted. 
  • Faculty will continue to have access to two years, plus this current academic year (2019/2020), of course data. Blackboard courses generated in the following academic cycles - 2017/2018, 2018/2019, 2019/2020 - will not be archived/deleted at this time.

When will courses be archived and deleted?

  • The archiving process will commence immediately. There will be no impact to Blackboard courses or Blackboard services during the archiving process. 
  • The deletion of Blackboard course data (Fall 2012 – Summer 2017 courses) will occur the weekend of January 11/12, 2020.
  • The process of archiving and deleting data from Blackboard will be carried out annually as per the retention policy and after the close out of each academic year.

Faculty considerations and responsibilities:

Faculty should export/archive any courses older than Fall 2017 that they wish to keep offline. This task should be ideally completed by December 20,  2019. 

  • Help documentation on how to export/archive a course can be found at here. Exported/archived courses should be saved either offline on a USB or uploaded to a cloud storage solution such as Microsoft OneDrive.
  • Faculty one-on-one support is available through the Instructional Support Studios. Lakeshore Campus, D112, x3288; North Campus, J230, x4744. Email for both locations is facultyblackboard@humber.ca.