myUSF Blackboard News

On September 23 we sent out a round of email stating that courses created in 2004 and earlier would be removed from the system in 30 days. The message read as follows:

Professor @@lname,

We apologize for the blast of emails today. We are cleaning out 4 semesters of old courses,
and our tool only lets us do it one semester at a time.

In order to allocate myUSF storage resources more effectively, course
sites created in @@semester will be permanently removed from
the system. This procedure is necessary to allow for the increased
use of Blackboard within our institution.

If you wish to retain a copy of the content of the course sites
identified below, please create your own export package(s) before
@@archivedate:
@@courselist

There are a number of options available for preservation of your course content:
- Export just the Gradebook in a Comma Separated format.
- Export the entire course.

Documentation on Importing & Exporting Courses:
http://wiki.it.usf.edu/index.php/Importing_%26_Exporting_Courses

Documentation on Exporting the Gradebook:
http://wiki.it.usf.edu/index.php/Export_Gradebook

We appreciate your cooperation with this effort.

Information Technology
help@usf.edu

Since the deployment of Blackboard, IT has maintained that we would try to maintain 5 years of course sites on Blackboard as long as it was technically feasible.

2009 was a busy year for IT, and we were lax in keeping up with the course cleanups. Thus we had courses as far back as Fall 2003 on the system, 4 full semesters of courses that needed removal. We had two options for cleaning courses, (1) Stager the emails and stretch the course removal over several months, or (2) Send a bunch of emails and do all the cleanup at once. We decided option 2 was the least disruptive to faculty, hence the blast of email yesterday.

As stated in the email, there are two options for maintaining a personal archive of your old course content.
1) Export just the grades [How do I do this?]
2) Export the entire course and all it’s contents. [How do I do this?]

As a side note, we are working on two projects.

The first is a utility that will allow faculty to request development course sites. These courses would have a very long expiration date, so that faculty can build up their courses in these development sites, and copy from the development site into their actual course at the start of each semester.

In the past we had not allowed for such courses precisely because they didn’t expire, and were outside out direct control. However 10 years of running Blackboard has shown that this restriction has side effects we didn’t predict, such as the impact of that volume of course data on Blackboard.

The second project: IT is working with the Courseware Steering Committee, CTIR, and faculty groups around campus to redefine the course retention policy to shorten it from 5 years online to something much more reasonable like 1-2 years online. 98% of courses are not accessed by instructors after the first year, and 99.44% are not accessed after the second year. Additionally, the single biggest reason to access the old course sites is to make changes and copy them into the new course sites at the start of each semester.

Removing courses more frequently would make the Blackboard system more responsive for users, easier to backup, and faster to upgrade. Faster, safer, more reliable. What’s not to love?

The availability of development course sites removes the single biggest reason to keep courses for more than a year. With a handful of development sites, we can reduce the number of long term, development oriented sites from 80000 down to about 6000. That’s an order of magnitude reduction.

With luck we’ll have all of this implemented in time for our upgrade to Blackboard 9 in December. We’ll be ready to start the new decade leaner, meaner, and ready to learn.

The Blackboard system experienced an operating system kernel error on one server which cascaded and was not handled properly by the cluster, resulting in Blackboard being unavailable for about 45 90 minutes, Tuesday, September 22, from approximately 8:45-10:15pm. No data was lost as a result of this outage.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Last year we released the ability for departments and advisers to communicate with your constituents. We’ve greatly expanded the options for how those sites can be automatically populated with students. In particular, we can now identify students based on:
- Their College, department, major, concentration, or degree code
- Their education level (Freshmen, Sophomore, Undergrad, Grad, etc.)
- Their home campus
- By Course SubjectName, CourseNumber, or section (i.e. LAE, 4414, or 001)

Even better, we can build up aggregations of these criteria, so that you don’t need to maintain multiple organizations sites.
For example, you can have a single organization that is automatically populated with students who are either
1) Tampa Industrial Engineering students
-or-
2) Undergraduate Students on Polytechnic campus taking course EEL4411

Awesome, no?

These sites are full-fledged Blackboard sites. They are very useful for sending email to the students you advise, and can also be used to make available departmental documents such as program requirements, graduation applications, course authorization request forms, and any other departmental paperwork you maintain. A discussion board is available to foster communication amongst your members. File uploads, announcements, surveys, everything you can do in a Blackboard course you can do here.

If you or your college or department is interested in one or more of these organizations, please fill out the brief request form located within Blackboard on the Organizations tab “Organization/Community Request” module.