How to Guides > How To Save Your Blackboard Content (End of Term)

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What happens to my site at end of term?

At the end of each term, or (for classes running continuously) whenever a group of users leaves and a new one starts using your site, a few steps need to be taken:

1. a full backup of your course should be made for safety
2. an export of your course materials without any semester-based data is needed for later re-use in another term
3. the user data (grades, statistics, uploaded files in dropbox) and the discussionboard messages need to be removed from the site to maintain an acceptable database-size and thus keep performance at reasonable levels for all users

We take care of this for all semester-based sites. Those are recognizable by the semester-suffix in their courseID, which is the last part of the course URL. These procedures are started two weeks after the end of classes, and sites will be made unavailable during this process (to avoid confusing users). This does not mean that you cannot get in, but you will have to type the course URL in (or use a bookmark), as the course will no longer show in My Blackboard. After we are done, we will make the sites available again.

You may need to save all of the following, depending on your needs (for sure the grades!). Suggestion: put these documents into a folder together with your original copies of all course documents you put on the site, organized similar to the site structure (it is always a good idea to have a backup). To save space, you can compress all of this with an archiving utility into ZIP format, using a tool such as WinZip, PKZip, or ZipMagic. Mac users should use MACzip, ZipIt, Dropzip, or Stuffit 5.5 Deluxe. Unix users may create .tar or .gz files instead.

1. Grades
2. Submitted documents
3. Discussionboard messages
4. Course Statistics
5. Email-addresses

1. You must save your course grades yourself by exporting the gradebook in delimited text format, which you can then import into any spreadsheet, database, or statistical application for further analysis, re-sorting, printing etc.

2. Documents uploaded by students, such as homework, papers, projects, should be saved to your own machine as soon as possible, just in case. If you plan to return them with comments to the students, you first need to save them locally anyway.

3. If you wish to have a (paper) copy of your discussionboard messages (or part of it), you can use the new Collect Messages feature to do so efficiently. Select all messages of interest (use Select All for everything in that forum) and choose Collect to place all messages into a single document, which can then be saved and/or printed, but only in Internet Explorer. To see these commands if they are not visible, click the grey tab labelled Show Options.

4. If certain access statistics are important to you, you also need to save those pages, but with images (in Netscape Navigator, choose File > Edit Page or Edit Frame, then save from within Netscape Composer to get the images saved as well). Make sure to hit the Reload button for each new statistics page to get updated images.

5. Printing/saving the student roster from Communications will give you a list of all email-addresses as well. You can also copy the text from that page and place it into a text file for easy importing into a spreadsheet (records delimited by whitespace).

In sites that are not semester-based, such as continuing education classes with frequently changing users, we cannot do your site cleanup for you. It needs to be done, however, to ensure good performance for everyone. So how can you help?

1. If your users stop using the site before a new set of users comes in, save your materials as described above, then use the Course Recycler to remove all statistics and user-based data from your site. You can leave the discussionboard messages in and selectively delete or archive only those messages that are not pertinent to the new users. The Course Recycler is located in Course Utilities, in the Control Panel. Anything you recycle or delete from your site is completely removed from the database, and files are moved to a recycling bin, which we periodically clean out.
2. If new users come in while old ones still need to use the site this option is not available, as you cannot do selective recycling. For such setups it is preferable to have two sites that are used in a rotating manner. Please request a second site (probably as a copy of your existing site) for such purposes.

Your site will always remain available to you for future development, unless you let us know that you don't need it anymore. When you are ready to use a site again for a future term, simply request its re-use via our site request form, and we will make a current copy with a new name reflecting the new term and add your users. Sites that have been inactive for a long time may be removed from the server, but a backup for re-importing will remain available.

If you need to keep a site around for demonstrations, to document your teaching, or for research purposes, that can be arranged via email to blackboard@uic.edu, but this should be done very sparingly. Please consider in all such cases which parts of your course are really needed (e.g. you might keep the discussionboard, but remove the user data and statistics).

It is usually much preferable to collect and save those messages and store them as documents on your site, without using the database so heavily. The same can be done for various snapshots of your course statistics. With this approach, you can even edit the exported messages to ensure anonymity and place them (or even all your materials) on a regular public website. To demonstrate the functionality of Blackboard CourseInfo itself in action, various dummy course sites are available, so you don't need previous semester's sites for that purpose.

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