Blackboard Archived Course Site Restoration

What Is It?

The policy to restore courses from UIC LMS has been established to balance a need to responsibly manage the amount of data in the Canvas and Blackboard Learn environments while also protecting student data. Instructors will continue to have access to courses they taught for a period of four years after the course was offered. After that period, courses are flagged for archival and then archived by default every June 1. Once a course is archived, the content is no longer available for instructors. 

Blackboard courses: Courses taught in Blackboard from Fall 2022 through Fall 2026 will remain available to instructors in Blackboard, the same as when they were active, until June 30, 2027. Starting June 30, 2027, access to these courses will be per request. Course content, such as files, will be restored to Canvas and made available there to instructors. Course activity, such as grades, discussion posts, and assignment submissions, will be delivered to the instructor per request; depending on the activity, it may be delivered in Canvas or in another format.

Requirements

Instructors can request a Course Restoration for courses offered more than four years ago for any of the following reasons:

1. Academic integrity investigation.
2. Access to student records for a registrar/dean-approved reason.
3. Student grade dispute.

Restoration of a course to retrieve content, such as a document or link, in an archived course will not be a valid reason to request restoration of an archived course. Please plan ahead or ask LTS for help. 

Where Can I Get It?

Courses no longer visible in Blackboard can be restored on a case-by-case basis. Restoring a course takes time and resources, therefore, LTS asks that instructors take time to review their old courses every year in order to preserve a local copy of any course content they wish to reuse. Select the Request Restoration of Archived Course Site button on this page to submit your request.

Please note that while all possible precautions were taken prior to the end of Blackboard LMS availability at UIC, which included over 80TB of data, there may be an occasional missed course, or an incomplete archive. Also, Banner was and remains the authoritative source of grade data for students. Further, this data is provided as "resultant" data and not "click stream" data. There is no archive of individual user steps or actions within a course outside of the final submitted work.

How Do I Use It?

If you have questions about how to keep a local copy of the content in your Blackboard courses, please request an appointment with one of LTS's Instructional Designers.

Here is where you can find Blackboard help for faculty and students.

How Can I Get Support?

If you are experiencing a problem with this service, please report it. If you just have a question, feel free to ask us.

Service Levels