Blackboard Archives & Content Extraction
- Blackboard courses will remain on the server for 8 quarters. After that we move an archive of each course to a permanent storage area and delete those courses off the server to make room for the more current courses.
- You can always request that we restore a course that is more than two years old from our saved archive, but it may take us several days to access and restore the file. You may wish to keep your own archived copies - instructions follow below.
- To request a course older than two years, please email bbhelp@wwu.edu with the CRN, Term, and Year of the course you wish restored.
Archiving Your Course
Archiving your course is recommended at the end of each term. Archiving records all the content, student data, discussions, and performance data into one zipped file.
To make an Archive file
- Select Packages and Utilities in the Control Panel of the Course you want to archive
- Select Export / Archive Course
- select Archive button
- Select options, then Submit button
- You'll get an email when the Archive is complete.
- After the email arrives, select Export/Archive course from the Control Panel again.
- Click on the archive link and select Save and select the location.
Course Content Extractor
To view the course in a web app (without Blackboard)
The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Information Technology Services' Teaching and Learning division has developed a new application and is making it available to the education community. bFree is a course extractor that makes a stand-alone web catalog from any Blackboard course content. While maintaining the organization of the original Blackboard course content, bFree creates a freestanding folder hierarchy.
With bFree, course content authors can:
- Conveniently retrieve course materials previously available only in Blackboard
- Produce independent course websites with the same content and structure as the original course embedded in Blackboard
- Apply a cascading style sheet (CSS) to customize the look and feel of their freestanding site
- Easily distribute and share course content files with others
Learn more about bFree or download the program
