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.

Photo credit

Horrgakx (http://www.flickr.com/photos/horrgakx/2964291546)

I think Screencast comes into its own when combined with Jing. Being able to rapidly and easily record a video of what’s happening on your screen and upload it with one button to your Screencast account is very very useful. From there you just need to distribute the video which you can do by emailing the URL to whomever, linking to it from a website or embedding the HTML, which is generated by Screencast, into a webpage or VLE course area.

However, Screencast is not just limited to Jing. You can upload other media files into it which presents, at least a temporary and low-level but immediate, solution to the problem of storage. Where to put files is the big problem that our staff encounter with online video. We usually suggest YouTube but some staff have issues with the public availability; which is reasonable. Screencast movies are, by the very nature of their being available to share, technically public but do not have the massive search engine of Google indexing their location.

Screencast also provides a few other functions:

• Customized Templates
• Desktop Uploader
• RSS Feeds so your users can subscribe to your media
• MediaRoll widget for blogs

So what does it do? It’s a free application that works as an excellent screen recorder; either video or a still image. It sits in a very tidy manner at the very top of your screen like so:

When you click on the unobtrusive circle you given the option to Capture or look at your History. The History option will bring up your Library; Jing will record every capture you’ve made and its current location. The second point there, location, is important… and we’ll get back to that in a bit.

The capture software gives you the option of a still image or video. The video is a fairly basic recorder but often-times that’s all you need. It will produce something like what you can link to below (note that all the images and videos in this post are recorded using Jing and hosted by Screencast… WordPress unfortunately will not accept embedded video from Jing so just click to follow the link instead). What I’ve recorded is a brief run-through of the annotation tools available for a still image. In this example, let’s say I’m giving an introduction to the tools in Photoshop. Audio can be included but I’ve decided not to.

Click here to see an example of Jing video on the screencast website

Lastly, I mentioned how important the location was to note. This is, in my opinion, where Jing excels. The biggest issue we find people have with online video is not how to record but where it goes. Jing will allow you to save any capture locally (the swf video comes with a player built into the file) but it will also upload any files to Techsmiths free hosting service called Screencast. You can also use it to FTP to any site or to upload to Flickr or YouTube. All very very useful. The free hosting service has a limit of 2GB of space and 2GB bandwith p/m usage but that’s more than enough for you to start making a library of short rough-and-ready content for your learners.

Lastly it also publishes a paragraph of HTML so you easily embed content into another location, for example your VLE course area.