Blackboard course quotas

From November 2021 we have introduced a quota for files uploaded to Blackboard courses. Initially this applies only to new courses created as a blank shell, or from a School template.

The new course quota is 5Gb. The vast majority of Blackboard courses are well below this size. Where courses are larger than 5Gb, this is usually because colleagues have uploaded

  • video files
  • Powerpoint files containing audio or video
  • or documents containing large numbers of high resolution images.

Not only do such files combine to use up our overall institutional allowance, but they are likely to be problematic for some students to open.

Please see our guidance on Managing file sizes

Please note: the course quota excludes files uploaded by students to assignments, journals etc.

Course quota warning messages

If the files uploaded to your course exceed 4Gb, a message will be displayed to Instructors in the Activity Stream.

Course quota warning displayed in the Activity Stream

Deleting files no longer in use

Please look at the files uploaded to your Blackboard course and delete any which are no longer needed.

These might include

Files from previous years

Some courses have hidden folders containing resources from previous academic years.

Screenshot of a hidden content folder

If these are not needed in the current academic year please delete them! We retain courses for 3 years after the year in which they ran, so you still have access to the resources in the course on which they were originally used.

Screenshot showing the Delete option for a folder

You should also delete any hidden, unwanted areas from the course menu.

Screenshot showing the Delete option for Blackboard course menu items

Screencasts and other video files

Screencasts should be uploaded to Stream.

You may have screencasts from previous academic years which were copied forward as part of rollover.
Please delete these from the 2021/22 course, by deleting the relevant folders or menu areas as shown above.

Ideally, if you have time, you should also delete these from the Content Collection folder for your course:

  • Go to Control Panel > Files > [your course id]
    Accessing the Content Collection folder for your course
  • Click on the SIZE column to sort the files by size.
  • Tick the box next to any files you wish to delete. Press Delete.
    Delete files from the Content Collection

PowerPoint files with video and audio

If you create a screencast in PowerPoint, please publish this directly from PowerPoint to Stream, then embed the Stream video into your Blackboard course.

To give your students access to the PowerPoint slides, please delete the audio/video content from the PowerPoint file and then overwrite the file currently in Blackboard.

Overwriting an attached file

 

For further help or guidance on any aspect of this, please contact the TEL team by logging a Service Desk ticket.


Page last updated on November 15, 2021 by andyturner