Blackboard Policy at UST...

Course Retention

Beginning in June 2006, IRT began a process for archiving and removing old courses from Blackboard. This process not only reduces the large number of courses listed on the “Courses” tab, but optimizes Blackboard to ensure the best performance of the system. 

We recognize that many faculty re-use course materials from semester to semester, using Blackboard’s “course copy” tool to move content from previous semesters or years into courses for the current semester. With this in mind, courses will be retained on the Blackboard system through the same term of the following year. For example, Spring 2006 courses will be available on Blackboard through the end of Spring semester 2007.

Export a Course for Re-Use

IRT recommends that faculty and staff Export a course if they intend to reuse the content in another course in the future. An exported course can be imported back into the Blackboard system by using the Import Package tool within a course.

Archive a Course for Record Keeping

IRT recommends that faculty and staff Archive their courses at the end of each term. Archiving creates a full backup of the course including all student information (grades, discussion board postings).

Restoring a course is recommended only when it is necessary to recover grade-related student information. Restoring a course will fully recreate the course including all course content and student information.

If you need to restore a course from your locally saved Archive, please contact your local Academic Technology Consultant for a consultation. If a course restore is needed your ATC will send the archive file to the Blackboard System Administrator to be restored back to the Blackboard system.

If you did not create a local backup of the course and need the course to be restored, please contact your Academic Technology Consultant. IRT can retrieve and restore a copy of the course; however this process will take up to 2 weeks.

Course Quotas

To maintain the performance of the Blackboard system, and to ensure that all courses have adequate space on the Blackboard server, each course has a “soft” quota of 225 MB and a “hard” quota of 250 MB. Organizations have a "soft" quota of 100MB and a "hard" quota of 110 MB. 

The purpose of the soft quota is to alert instructors that they are approaching the hard quota limit. Once the hard quota limit is reached, instructors will not be able to upload content into the course. The typical Blackboard course at UST is 20 MB, and most courses will not reach the quota limits. Should an increase in a course quota be needed, please contact the IRT Tech Desk.

 

File Upload Quota

In addition to the course quota, each Blackboard course has a maximum file upload quota of 15MB. The file upload quota means that instructors and students will not be able to upload files over 15MB into Blackboard. File upload quotas have been implemented because students are often unable to download large files via slower Internet connections such as a modem. For assistance with optimizing and reducing the size of files, please contact your Academic Technology Consultant.

 

Content System Quota

Faculty and staff have a quota of 250MB in their personal folder in the "My Content" area of the Content System. Students have a quota of 100MB. For assistance with your Content System quota, please contact your Academic Technology Consultant or the IRT Tech Desk.

With permission of a dean, a department chair may be granted temporary "guest" access to the blackboard site of a department member's course for purposes of independently validating assertions made about the course. IRT will grant only the temporary access right, and will not participate in any search or review of documents.

 

System Maintenance

MyUST (Blackboard) is not available daily from 4:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. CST for routine system maintenance. Also, system upgrades may occur once a month on Sundays from 6:00 a.m. to 12 noon CST. IRT will announce any system upgrades in advance through the Bulletin Today.