Courses in Blackboard will be kept online until the next year’s version of the course has ended (e.g. fall 06 courses will be deleted at the end of the fall 07 semester). Academic technology staff will delete older courses at the end of every semester. Faculty will be responsible for backing up or archiving course material before it is deleted. Academic Technology will notify faculty prior to deleting courses, will provide documentation and support to help faculty keep permanent personal copies of course materials, and will remind faculty of the process for requesting exceptions.

Rationale 

This policy is intended to improve the performance of Blackboard by reducing the size of the Blackboard database. The Bb database now contains over 42 Gb of data and the database is growing more each year as more courses with more online content are developed by faculty. Our monitoring of Bb activity strongly suggests that access to the database is limiting the overall performance of the Bb system. Furthermore other schools report that reducing the size of the database improves performance.
 
The policy is intended to allow faculty access to past materials to be revised for use in present courses. For those courses that remain online after they end, faculty will be responsible for complying with copyright laws that may require hiding copyrighted material. Faculty will also be responsible for archiving or backing up their own course materials if they wish to have access after the courses are deleted from Blackboard. Academic Technology will notify faculty at least 30 days prior to deleting courses, and will provide documentation and support on how to keep their own copies of course materials. Faculty with special needs for keeping course materials online longer than the policy indicates can request an exception to this policy from Academic Affairs if no other way can be found to meet their needs.
 
The policy allows students to access a full year of their courses. The policy does not allow longer term access to coursework but Academic Affairs is exploring more appropriate and separate portfolio systems for that purpose. Programs that require longer term access to courses for accreditation or use in preparing for boards can request an exception to this policy from Academic Affairs if no other way can be found to meet their special needs.