Making Backups of Your Course

You may also back up the following individual elements:

• Discussion boards
• Submitted assignments
• Test results (answers submitted by students)

Archive Course: Creates a permanent record of a course including content and user interactions. This is useful for keeping a record of your course as required by CUNY.

Go to the Control Panel and choose Archive Course. You can choose if you want to keep the Grade Center History (if you uncheck this, you will keep current Grade Center grades, but not the history of grades that have been changed).

Once the archive process has completed, you should receive an email. Then go back to Control Panel and Archive Course. You will see a link that you can right-click on to save the file. This zip file is meant to be imported back into a Blackboard course when necessary.

Export Course: Creates a file with course content that can later be imported and used to teach another course with the same content. Student work is not included. You can choose which areas you would like to export.

Go to the Control Panel and choose Export Course. Choose the areas you want to export.

Once the export process has completed, you should receive an email. Then go back to Control Panel and Export Course. You will see a link that you can right-click on to save the file. This zip file is meant to be imported back into a Blackboard course when necessary.

Download Grade Center: Saves the Grade Center to an Excel file.

Go to the Control Panel and choose Grade Center. In the Manage menu, choose Download.

You can choose to save the full grade center, separated by tabs, without hidden information. The file you download is in xls format, which can be opened in Excel or imported to other spreadsheet programs.

Copy Student Email Addresses: Copy and paste students' email addresses.

Go to the Control Panel and choose List Users. Choose List All. Copy and paste the student information into Word, Excel, or other program for editing/saving.

You can create a email Group in Lotus Notes by going into your address book, and choosing New-Group. Type a name for the group. In the Members box, paste the email addresses, one per line. If you like to retain the students' names in addition to the email addresses, use this format: FirstName LastName <emailaddress>.

Discussion Boards: Select the threads you want to save, then collect them.

Enter the forum, the select the thread(s) you want to save. Click on the Collect button. After the posts are collected, you may want to make sure that they are sorted by Thread Order in Ascending Order.

You can then print the collected posts, or highlight, copy and paste them into Word or another program.

Download Submitted Assignments: Save student-submitted assignment files in a single zip file.

Go to Control Panel, Grade Center. Find the column for the assignment, and click on the double down arrow to the right of the column name. Choose Assignment File Download.

Select some or all of the student files to download and then save the zip file.

Save Test Results: Save questions and students' answers in an Excel-readable file.

Go to Control Panel, Grade Center. Find the column for the quiz or test and click on the double down arrow to the right of that column name. Choose Download Results.

In the next screen, right-click on "Click to download results" and save the file.