This notice is being sent to the Bb mailing list. It may or may not apply to you.
-----SHORT ACTION ITEM-----
If you have a Blackboard course site for a course that was completed prior to Summer 2003, and you still have students using it, you need to let us know before Wednesday, June 8.
-----COMPLETE EXPLANATION-----
We are beginning a project to clean up the Blackboard system. The final phase will remove Blackboard course sites from courses that were completed more than two years ago. For most of you this is not a problem. In fact, you are probably wishing we would have been doing this all along. But there may be a few of these sites that are still needed out of the 22,000+ sites that we will be cleaning up this summer. Therefore we are going to do this in phases. We will begin Phase 1 in two weeks.
PHASE 1: On Wednesday, June 8, we will set the course sites of courses prior to Summer 2003 to "Unavailable." That will mean that students will no longer be able to see or access those course sites. All material will remain in the course sites. You will still be able to access everything, including course statistics. The only change will be that students will not be able to access the sites.
PHASE 2: On Wednesday, June 15, we will send you instructions on how to save archive copies of your course sites onto your computer. With an archive copy you can have us restore your course site to the Blackboard system, should you need it. If you don't need the old material, you can ignore this step. The archive has no value other than to do a restore.
PHASE 3: On Wednesday, July 20, we will remove the course sites from courses prior to Summer 2003. The course sites, all materials, and all statistics will be removed from the Blackboard system. The course sites will no longer appear in your "All Courses" listing. There will be no way to recover the content of the site unless you made and have kept an archive copy.
-----ACTION ITEM-----
If you have a Blackboard course site for a course that was completed prior to Summer 2003, and you still have students using it, you need to let us know. Courses that were in the UM registration system or were merged from registration system courses will be affected. Special sites that we created manually will not be affected.
-----ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS-----
HOW CAN I TELL WHICH SITES ARE GOING TO BE MADE UNAVAILABLE?
If you need to know in advance, go to Blackboard and click on the "All Courses" tab. There is a "Course ID" listed for each of your courses. Typical courses end with a three digit code that indicates the academic year and semester. The first two digits represent the academic year. All course sites with IDs that end with the following codes will be set to unavailable for students.1999-2000 academic year: -000, -001, -002, -003, -004
2000-2001 academic year: -010, -011, -012, -013, -014
2001-2002 academic year: -020, -021, -022, -023, -024
2002-2003 academic year: -030, -031, -032Special course sites that do not end with a semester code are NOT part of this project. They will remain as they currently exist.
HOW CAN I TELL IF A SITE IS UNAVAILABLE TO STUDENTS?
Go to Blackboard and click on the "All Courses" tab. Courses that are unavailable will say so after the course title.
WILL I STILL BE ABLE TO ACCESS THE SITES WHEN THEY ARE UNAVAILABLE?
Yes. When Phase 1 is complete you will still be able to access the site. You can get to it from the "All Courses" tab. When Phase 3 is complete the course will be gone from the system and you will not be able to access it any longer.
WHAT SHOULD I DO IF I NEED TO ALLOW STUDENTS TO CONTINUE TO ACCESS ONE OF THESE OLD SITES?
Let blackboard@miami.edu or bill.vilberg@miami.edu know the course ID of the course that you need us to leave active.
CAN AN UNAVAILABLE SITE BE MADE AVAILABLE AFTER JUNE 8?
Phase 1, setting the sites to "Unavailable," is accomplished with a simple setting in the Blackboard system. It can be manually reversed by us or by you and everything will be as it was. This is unlike Phase 3 which cannot be undone.
Bill Vilberg
305-284-3949 (work); 786-218-3052 (cell); 305-255-9138 (home)
