Blackboard Business Rules

(approved by the Teaching, Learning, & Technology Committee in collaboration with Enterprise Technology Services on September 28, 2011)

Maintenance

Blackboard Managed Hosting (BMH) should schedule maintenance during the following times (in descending order of preference):

  1. Saturday, 2 AM- 6AM
  2. Sunday, 3 AM- 6 AM
  3. Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, 3 AM- 5 AM

BMH may schedule maintenance at other times, as long as BMH notifies ETS and CETLA as soon as possible.

Announcements

ETS should announce maintenance schedules or technical difficulties via the appropriate channels:

  1. The Blackboard System Administrator will post an announcement within Blackboard.
  1. ETS will send a technology alert to all employees and students if the interruption is going to last more than an hour.
  1. CETLA will email an update to the faculty via HU Communications if faculty need to prepare for significant downtime, purges, upgrades, etc. CETLA will also ask the Graduate School to notify Teaching Associates.

Course Availability

  1. Faculty will decide when to make their classes available to students. Thus, the default setting will be “Not Available.”
  1. Faculty should make courses from the previous semester unavailable on the first day of the new semester. However, faculty may make these courses available again if needed (e.g., to clear an Incomplete for a student). Just before classes begin, CETLA will remind faculty to make old courses unavailable and new courses available.
  1. BMHwill maintain courses on the servers for 18 months.
  1. ETS and CETLA will remind facultyto archive any soon-to-be purged courses that they wish to keep. Reminders should be issued at least a month ahead of time and just before the deadline.
  1. CETLA will continue to ask faculty to post links to video and audio files instead of uploading the files to the Blackboard server. However, if the University is in danger of exceeding the server space allotted in its contract, ETS will impose the disk space and file size policy adopted by the TLT at its 9-27-06 meeting:
  2. Soft Quota for Disk Space:Warn the instructor when the course size exceeds 425 MB.
  3. Hard Quota for Disk Space:Enforce a maximum course disk size of 500 MB.
  4. Maximum File Size:Limit the maximum size of a single file upload to 50 MB.

The Blackboard system administrator will announce the quota policy on the Blackboard site and monitor requests for more space, granting overrides when justified. The TLT, in consultation with ETS, will periodically revisit this issue to determine whether the quotas should be adjusted.