As many of you already know, the University purges Blackboard courses twice a year, typically in October and in March. This is part of our regular ongoing Blackboard maintenance and these courses are academic CRN-based courses that were taught over a year ago, so they are past the deadline for incompletes or grade disputes. On Oct. 18, 2024, all Spring 2023, and Summer 2023 Blackboard courses will be removed from active status on Blackboard. While we have backups of the instructor content, all student content—discussions, grades, assignment submissions, and any other student data—is not backed up. Once the course is purged, you and your faculty will no longer have access to student data. If any student content needs to be kept for accreditation or any other reason, faculty should download it prior to Oct. 17, 2024. While in the past, we filtered out some courses from the purge due to accreditation needs, we are now paying for Blackboard storage and cannot afford to keep courses up just for the purpose of storing accreditation evidence and artifacts.
If you or your faculty have any questions about Blackboard course deactivation or need assistance downloading student content, please contact Academic Technology, Teaching, and Learning at 860.768.4661 or actech@hartford.edu.