Policies

Blackboard Storage

As you may be aware, storage of online courses involves incurred costs (allotted and enforced by providers) therefore steps must be taken to regularly “clean-up” our Blackboard environment and physical servers. The Department of Online Learning (and in collaboration with IT) will formally develop a policy for retention of Blackboard course shells. Here is our intent:

• Course shells will remain accessible (via Blackboard) to faculty for 2 years after the last day of each term.
• After this point, these courses will be archived (with content, student records, communications, etc. intact) to IT’s storage server and will be available for five years. During this five-year period, faculty can request to have this content restored (this can be requested by emailing helpdesk@njcu.edu).
• After course archives have been stored on the server for five years, the archive files/courses will be permanently deleted. Special considerations may apply and can be requested by emailing helpdesk@njcu.edu.
• The course deletion and archive processes will occur after every term.
• It is recommended that you make copies of your content or archive your own courses if you would like to have access to your course content/records longer than the durations mentioned above.

Please review the Knowledge Base articles, for archiving/exporting Blackboard courses here: https://njcu.info/help/kb/blackboard-instructors/course-maintenance

 For assistance with archiving your own courses, please email helpdesk@njcu.edu.