I recently received notification from Blackboard regarding a security risk with the Course Archive Tool, advising that access to this be turned off to all users. We have complied and you will no longer have this available in your Control Panel. In addition to notifying our faculty of this, I want to ask that you keep any previously archived files secure.
This process revision gives us an opportunity to review the options available. Actually, there are better course saving tools available for faculty use. This is because the file produced with the Course Archive tool does not allow you to fully restore a course without a tool only available to the Blackboard Administrator, and it involves a lengthy process if student enrollments must be rebuilt. This is rarely done anyway, since our policy here in eLearning is to leave all course shells on our Blackboard servers for two years. After that time, they are archived and then removed from our servers. Pre-shells are never removed unless you request me to do so.
Download Gradebook Tool
There is an important distinction to make regarding the separate nature of student enrollments and Blackboard course content. It’s easy to assume that copying a course also copies the enrolled students and their coursework, however that is not the case. If the students are no longer registered at Clark, they will fail to reappear when the course is restored, no matter how you save the course. This is because the enrollment database is in a constant state of flux, with only currently registered students accessible each quarter, while the Blackboard content database is more constant, only changing when faculty make adjustments to their courses. You could think of course shells as virtual classrooms which you can build, maintain, or change as you see fit. The students, however, will come and go – just as they do in the face-to-face environment… Your only record of them is what you store or have recorded in IBC. This is why it’s important to save your Gradebooks from Blackboard using the Download Gradebook tool at the end of each quarter, before I run our snapshot process and the student enrollment files change. The date that this will occur is posted in our Faculty Blackboard Planner page, as well as my end of term email announcement.
Course Export and Import Tools
The best tools for saving a personal copy of a course are Export and Import. Keep in mind that these tools will not store or restore the students and their work, only the course content and structure. The following are important points to consider:
- Exporting a course creates a downloadable package of the course content (compressed .zip file) that can later be imported into a Blackboard shell
- Because the exported file can be imported as the whole course or as selected parts of the course through Import Package, it’s recommended that you select all areas when exporting a course
- The saved file can only be viewed by being imported into Blackboard
- Importing does not overwrite any existing information in the destination course in the following areas: Content, Discussion Boards, Gradebook Items, Groups, Tests, Surveys, and Pools. Imported information in these areas is added to existing information in the destination course.
- Importing does overwrite Course Settings (if selected) in the destination course (other than the Course ID and Menu Settings).
Course Copy Tool
Although the Course Copy tool doesn’t provide a personal copy of each course, which could later be moved to another Blackboard installation or reimported, it is the most common method for transferring courses from quarter to quarter or section to section. This wizard based tool won’t overwrite any existing content, so it’s easy to unintentionally duplicate items, unless copying into an empty shell. Use of the Recycle tool can help clean out excess content when necessary. To help with this process, here is a short video about how to use the Course Copy tool:
I hope that explains the options now available for saving courses… Please feel free to comment or contact me in eLearning for more information.
