When are Blackboard courses retired?

Course retirement is when shells are moved from UA’s production instance of Blackboard to a 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. 

Live Courses

Live courses are Blackboard courses that contain student data and enrollments. Courses that will be retained on our production instance include:

  • The current/upcoming academic year

  • The last two (2) historical academic years.

As of September 2024, the following terms are available to faculty:

Semester Code

Term

Semester Code

Term

Semester Code

Term

Semester Code

Term

202440

Fall 2024

202310

Spring 2023

202430

Summer 2024

202240

Fall 2022

202410

Spring 2024

202230

Summer 2022

202340

Fall 2023

 

 

202330

Summer 2023

 

 

Non-integrated courses

Non-integrated courses do not have student enrollments. Non-integrated courses include practice courses, resource courses, and development courses. Each year, the following will be retired:

  • Any course with two (2) years of inactivity

Timeline

Time

Task

Time

Task

April / May

Faculty are reminded of the course retirement process

June / July

CIT staff work with Blackboard support to archive courses

August / September

Courses are successfully retired and removed from production

Before courses are retired, faculty can save content from the course and can export their course content to be later imported back into Blackboard.