For this message, I asked two of Drake’s Learning Technology experts, Clayton Mitchell and Karly Good, to help me understand—and communicate about—the limits to course storage that many faculty may begin encountering as we build our course sites for Spring 2022.

Here’s what I learned:

In the past year, Blackboard started charging clients for storage.  This is a change from the past and was a surprise to all Blackboard clients when it occurred with little notice.  Being good stewards of University money, we are being mindful of the amount of storage used for courses, so that we do not increase our financial responsibility for Blackboard.

This is potentially frustrating (ie: if you run out of storage space, and don’t understand why!), but easy to avoid and remediate.  Here are important things for instructors to know:

1. Videos usually take up the largest space usage per course.  Fortunately, Drake has a platform, Panopto, that is better suited for maintaining and streaming videos.  Use Panopto to avoid using storage in BlackBoard.
2. The storage costs also impacted the amount of time we can keep a course on Blackboard.  We no longer keep a course available on the LMS for longer than two years.  We do maintain archives for a longer period of time with a maximum of about five years.  Plan ahead, if you anticipate teaching a course that may have been archived (or no longer remains available).
3. We can’t restore Blackboard courses with a size above 2GB.  Keeping courses small will allow us to maintain their course content long term via archival processes and restorations upon request.

As you begin copying courses for spring, know that there will be variations on that process.

• If you are copying from Original course view, please use the correct instructions and start in the course from the past that currently contains the content.
• If you are copying from Ultra course view, the process starts from the future/empty course and pulls content in from past courses. You have more granularity about what you copy with the new process. (Don’t copy items that are broken – this will help clean up courses with transition errors.
• Here is a link to instructions that will help you efficiently copy courses:  Instructions for copying courses.
• Please remove any repeated links referring to the Support Center after you copy content.

As always, there are great resources published by our learning technologists, on the ITS webpages, to help you with the process of course copying, content. management, and storage maintenance. Here is the link to the Academic Technology Resources library.

— Renée Cramer, Deputy Provost