Blackboard course cleanup
It is recommended to check the size of your course at the end of every term. You can view your course storage information by logging into your Original Course View course site and navigating to the Control Panel, then scrolling down to Course Tools, and clicking on Course Storage. A screen will display the total storage for the course, and to review all courses assigned to you, click the Next button.
Or you can view your course storage information by logging into your Ultra Course View course and selecting Books & Tools on the left side of the screen. This will open a panel on the right side of the screen. Select Course Storage to display the total storage for the course and to review all courses assigned to you click the Next button.
Maintaining Course Storage
You can maintain your course storage by following these tips and suggestions:
- Keep your courses free of old content.
- Take time to determine whether all files are needed and must be copied into your next course.
- Before you start adding new content to your course shell review existing files and keep only the files that students need.
- Avoid uploading file types that take up significant storage space and are better suited for cloud storage or streaming video servers, including:
- Large images (tif/tiff, bmp, jpg, xif, heif, psd, svg, eps).
- Narrated or animated PowerPoint (ppt, pptx, pps, ppm, ppsx, key).
- Audio (mp3, mp4, wav).
- Video (wmv, avi, mp4, m4v, mov).
- Interactive assets (swf, flv).
- Computer executables (iso, exe).
- Compressed files (zip, rar, tar.gz, bz2).
- Store large files in UIC-supported Cloud Storage.
- Use cloud storage services such as Google Drive or Box, and link the files to your course instead of uploading them to Blackboard directly.
- This way, you will not store copies of the same file when you copy your Blackboard course.
- You can also modify files on your desktop computer by syncing them to the cloud storage tool of your choice.
- Create or upload videos in UIC-dedicated media servers like Echo360 or Panopto.
- You should consider using Panopto or Echo360 for video content, including video assignments students need to submit.
- Both platforms can integrate with Zoom, so recordings saved to the Zoom cloud can be automatically loaded to your Echo360 or Panopto account.
- Remember that Blackboard is not a streaming server, uploading media files degrades system performance.
Please note that instructors will receive an error message when courses exceed the 2GB limit, and will not be able to upload additional material until another course material is removed or a request for more storage capacity is approved.
Information on Storage Quota Policy
At UIC, the Blackboard learning management system is the centralized system for thousands of course sites prepared by instructors and serves over 26,000 UIC users daily. In an effort to properly manage storage resources and ensure adequate system performance, the LMS Governance Board, a subcommittee of ITLC Educational Technology Committee, implemented a new policy in July of 2021 that sets storage quota for Blackboard courses to 2GB.
Need more storage?
If more storage space is necessary for your course, the quota can be increased in 1GB increments by submitting a Blackboard Course Quota Increase Request. After a request is submitted, staff from the Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence will increase the quota or contact the requestor to review options. There is no charge to increase a course quota.
If you have questions about managing files in your Blackboard course, contact the Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence Support team at LTS@uic.edu.
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