In the 2021-2022 academic year, DoIT shifted to a more routine, annual basis of retiring older Blackboard course shells.
Course retirement is when shells are moved from UMBC's production instance of Blackboard to an intermediate storage location for the purpose of auditing, accreditation, and record keeping. Retiring courses is necessary to ensure that our production site is operating at peak performance by simplifying data and data structures.
Courses that will be retained on our production instance include:
- The current/upcoming academic year
- The last three (3) historical academic years
For example, during the 2023-2024 academic year, the following terms are available to faculty:
- AY2023-2024
- AY2022-2023
- AY2021-2022
- AY2020-2021
Courses that will be retired on an annual basis include:
- Any course shell older than four (4) academic years
For example, at the beginning of the 2024-2025 academic year, the following terms will be retired:
- AY2020-2021
- Any course shell still on the system before Fall 2021
| Time | Task |
|---|---|
| April / May | Faculty are reminded of the course retirement process |
| June / July | DoIT staff work with Blackboard to properly archive and retire courses |
| August / September | Courses are successfully retired and off-loaded from production |
Before courses are retired, faculty can export their Blackboard course shells to be later imported back into Blackboard.