Sixty days after the last day of each semester, instructors’ students will disappear from that semester’s Blackboard courses. In general, this means students will disappear from fall courses early the next February and will disappear from spring courses in the following July.

So if you are an instructor using Blackboard, we strongly recommend that you create an archive of your course that you retain and that you also download students’ grades and discussion board interactions.  The best time o do this is after instructors have completed grading but before the 60-day mark arrives.

Other than student interactions and grades, all materials will remain in your course until you request its removal or five years has passed (whichever comes first).

Download Grades

To download your grades, in Grade Center go to WorkofflineDownload and save the full Grade Center. On the next screen, be sure to hit Download instead of OK.

Archive and Download Course Materials

A course archive retains all content of a course including student materials and grades, but it does it in such a way that single archive file is created that can be downloaded for retention’s sake, but it cannot be fully explored without uploading into a new or temporary Blackboard course in the online system.

If you would like to keep an archive of the course, follow these instructions:

1. Go to your course’s Control Panel and select “Packages and Utilities” and then “Export/Archive Course”

2. Click the “Archive” button, select options, and hit “Submit.”

3. After you’ve received your confirmation e-mail that the course has been archived (usually within 10-20 minutes), go back to “Export/Archive Course” in your Control Panel.

4. Left-click the archived .zip file and save it to your desktop.

An archive .zip file contains the course content in a format that is not directly readable.  However, if you’d like to view the contents of your archived course, download bFree, a free Blackboard course extractor created by the University of North Carolina: http://its2.unc.edu/tl/tli/bFree/.

If you would like to archive discussion board postings, go to your course’s Discussion Board and select all posts you would like to keep. Select “Collect” and then “Print Preview”. To save them digitally, print to PDF; you can also print hard copies.

If you have any questions, please send an email to blackboard@richmond.edu .

Thank you.