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MCC Daily Tribune

Reminder: Backup Your Blackboard Content and Gradebooks before December 15th!

Faculty and/or Staff with materials in Blackboard- Please read this important communication regarding the sunset of Blackboard (also known as the old myMCC portal). 

We know it may be hard to believe, but the Virtual Campus is making preparations for decommissioning our Blackboard space. Our Blackboard end date is officially December 21, 2022 at 5pm EST where access to Blackboard will no longer be accessible after this time. We plan to have everything moved off of Blackboard by December 15, 2022. While we know this date seems far off, it will be here before you know it! We want to make sure you start thinking ahead about what you need to save to prepare for the start of the next semester and beyond. 

  • The majority of our faculty have used the export process from Blackboard to import materials into Brightspace (if the file size is under 2GB). This process can be easily followed again for your spring semester courses and D2L has even made some improvements to the import process, however, your export needs to be done before December 21st! We will not be exporting your materials for you, so please plan accordingly. 
    • If you are teaching a course in the spring semester, please begin thinking about any remaining courses you may need to export now. You should export a copy of your various course preps and save them safely to a storage location of your choice so it is readily available to you. Exported zip files can be imported directly into Brightspace right now (no student data is saved, just your content is moved) and placed into a practice course shell. If you need more practice course shells, please reach out. 
    • Please remember that additional clean up to an imported course will be needed. Our team can work with you during our zoom drop-in hours to support this process.
    • Our intersession and spring course “live” course shells will be ready within a week, so you can get a head start. 
  • Our team has the ability to assist with the process of moving content with our K16 migration tool. If you have “robust” Blackboard content remaining that you haven’t yet transferred to Brightspace, or your zip file size is over 2GB, you may consider submitting a request to have your content migrated with K16. This does take some time to process, roughly 1-2 weeks and we can place the content into your practice course shell or live shell once it’s ready. If you had challenges with your test transfer, rubrics, images, etc.,  you may want to see if you get better results with this tool. *Disclaimer- some general cleanup is still needed*. We are accepting requests now for all course types. Please see our request form located in our VC Faculty Center (see forms for request and use the K16 form). 

Archiving Content

Course content and student data from Blackboard will be archived by K16.  All course content and student data will be stored in a central location, yet inaccessible to you (just our Virtual Campus Team), in case we need to retrieve student data for a prior course. This means you will need to download your gradebooks for each Blackboard course section and save them for your records from the past two years to comply with the college’s records retention policy. If you have been doing this all along, great! You are all set. If you haven't, follow the steps below:

  • How to save your Grade Center in Blackboard - Download the full grade center of each course section you have taught for the past two years and save them for your records. This process is easy and takes a few minutes, but give yourself enough time depending on the number of course sections you teach each semester. 
    • Go to the “Full Grade Center”, click on the “work offline” tab, and the “download” option in each course section. If you have a merged course, make sure to work from the merged shell. Keep the default options and download the file to your local computer. 
    • You may want to save the Excel file with the Semester-Course Name-Number-Section, and save it in a file folder structure by semester (electronically). 
    • For more details, see Work Offline with Grade Data


We will be reminding you gently over the next several weeks! If you need assistance, remember you can visit us in our drop-in support hours during the week through zoom or email us. Please don’t wait until the last minute to save what you need! 

Andrea Gilbert
Instructional Technologies
10/19/2022