Archiving Blackboard Assignment Submissions

Stella — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:58:35 +0000

If your students have been busy submitting their assignments online throughout the year, you will have a large number of submissions that you’ll need to keep for a number of years to come. During the academic year, it is useful to keep these within Blackboard for both tutors and students to access. Once the year comes to an end and the course isn’t active, it is no longer possible, or desirable to keep assignments on the VLE as an archive.

You will need to download all your students’ assignments and store them outside of the VLE for safe keeping. This post explains why you can’t leave old assignments in Blackboard, and how to get them out…

Why can’t I just leave them in Blackboard indefinitely?

There are two main reasons why you can’t leave old submissions in Blackboard as an archive…

Disk space

Firstly, Blackboard is a live system with over 800 active courses and hundreds of users logging on each day. A system with such heavy use inevitably needs closely monitoring and it is regularly serviced to ensure it remains secure and available. We try to keep servicing to out of hours, but the more content there is the longer it takes to perform maintenance tasks, which means more downtime for users.

Also, if we keep lots of content in Blackboard, we risk clogging up space and slowing it down for the users logging in to access their course areas.

So, we try to keep Blackboard for active courses, and it is better to use your departmental network, or the college filestore for storing archive files.

Obsolete Course Areas

Secondly, we often find obsolete courses which haven’t been accessed in a long time, course which have no students enrolled on them, or orphaned courses which have no instructors or designers. This happens easily when a staff member leaves the College, or has set up a course as an experiment and has forgotten about it.

These are the first courses we delete when we perform housekeeping of Blackboard.

If you keep a course simply to archive submissions, it is unlikely you will be accessing it regularly, and there will be no students enrolled on it. If you leave QM, you may not remember that there is an archive of student work in a Blackboard area with no students or staff enrolled. This leaves it vulnerable to becoming obsolete and it is much more secure to download them from the VLE and store them securely where other members of the department can access them.

OK, how do I download student submissions from Blackboard

The feature you should use to collate all the submission you want to download is called Create Printable View which is available from within the Assignment Dropbox.

The following movie demonstrates how to download your students’ submissions from Blackboard. You should store them on your departmental network or on the College’s central filestore.

For more comprehensive instructions, or if you can’t view the movie, please see archiving student work on the Blackboard Support Site.

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