Please do it NOW! Archive your online courses at Learn@PolyU!

Do you want to know more about how effective your Blackboard course is? Do you want to increase your students’ success by understanding more about their online behaviour in your Blackboard course? If you are interested in analysing the data to answer the above questions, you should read this blog. It will introduce to you how to make use of the course archive to achieve this.

How about course reports?

You may have a question: There is already a course reports function in Blackboard. Why do I need to use this archive to analyse my courses? The reason is simple -- the content of the bundled course reports function is  quite limited. Do you want to obtain raw data or detailed data for customizing your own report? We have discovered a way that archiving your Blackboard course could help you to obtain the raw data. Details of that method will be introduced later. Nevertheless, you should archive your course ASAP and should perform it before 14^th July, 2017.

14^th July, 2017 is a Key date for semester 2 of 2016/17 academic year! Please archive before this date!

This date is critical because the usage data* will only be preserved in the system for 180 days. The semester 2 of 2016/17 started on 15^th January, 2017 which is 180 days before 14^th July, 2017. After this critical day, the system will start removing the usage data on or after 15^th July. If you archive your courses now, you will be able to retrieve the semester 2 data for future use.

* Usage data means the logs that record the user behaviour. For example, when a student has assessed an item.

How to archive your online course?

1. Go to the Export/Archive Course under your course’s Control Panel
2. Click the “Archive Course” button to enter a setting page (see the picture below)

3. The reason for making an archive is to preserve the data for future use. Therefore, you have to do the following before pressing the submit button (see the picture above):

• Click the check box “the include Grade Center History”
• Select the option* “Copy only links to course default directory files”
• Select the option* “Copy only links to files stored outside of the course default directory”

*These options are to keep data for analysis. If you want to back up everything, including all the files, e.g. pdf, ppt and video, please select the second option “Copy links and include copies of files…” for both.

4. Wait for the auto-email sent from the system which notifies you that your package is ready for download. If you receive the email and still cannot find the link of the package for download, you can press the Refresh button.
5. Download the package by clicking the link of the package and store it on a reliable device.

If you have several Blackboard courses, you can repeat the above steps for each courses.

Note: The exact way to analyse the data will be discussed in future.

So, what are you waiting for?

If you want to preserve the data for future use, you should archive your course immediately. Otherwise, after 14^th July, 2017, you will never have the second chance to obtain the data for analysis. We are exploring the possibility of extracting useful data from the archive package. Hope this will help you to evaluate your Blackboard course in the coming future. Please pay attention to our elearning support website and EDC workshop.

If you have any difficulties to archive your online course, please contact your department technician or ITS HOTS.