Recordings are deleted every six months. While specific dates will differ, recordings will be deleted in December shortly after the fall semester ends and in June shortly after the spring semester ends.
Blackboard/Class Collaborate is built specifically for the education environment and helps you build and share engaging content, build instructor presence, and develop a learning community. While it is primarily a synchronous tool, to ability to record sessions is a critical component of any web conferencing tool, enabling students to catch up on sessions they missed or review key content from sessions they attended.
In the past, NIU has retained all Collaborate recordings indefinitely, we have finite storage available for recordings. The recent growth in the use of Collaborate has vastly exceeded that capacity. Continuing to retain recordings above our storage limit will incur significant additional charges to NIU. Therefore, reasonable limitations on recording storage must be implemented to ensure long-term feasibility and access to resources.
Effective April 30, 2022, Collaborate recordings will be retained for 6 months. If recordings are needed for re-use or longer retention, you may download recordings from Collaborate. Recordings that will be viewed frequently can be uploaded to Kaltura. Videos that are needed for long-term retention but which will not be viewed frequently should be stored in Microsoft OneDrive.
There are also benefits to storing Collaborate recordings on other platforms for long-term use or retention.
All NIU Collaborate users are encouraged to download recordings from the Collaborate scheduler at the end of each semester for upload to Kaltura or Microsoft OneDrive. The Division of IT will send notifications to everyone with the Instructor role in a Blackboard Course or the Leader role in a Blackboard Organization prior to the deletion of the recordings.
To download a recording:
The recording will automatically download to your computer in an .mp4 format.
If you plan to reuse a recording as content in a course as opposed to storing it as an archive, we recommend downloading the recording and uploading it to Kaltura. Videos on Kaltura are also subject to retention guidelines, and Kaltura is not intended for storage of archival video content.
Once your video has been uploaded to Kaltura, you can link or embed the video in your Blackboard course.
If you have a large number of recordings that you need to retain for future courses (i.e., recordings that you will use as content in a future course), please contact the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning using the Ask a Question form. If you provide the course number (e.g., UNIV 101) for the course(s) that contains the recordings, we can work with DoIT to have those moved to Kaltura for you in bulk.
Unfortunately, due to storage limitations on Kaltura, DoIT cannot move recordings to Kaltura for all courses.
815-753-8100
servicedesk@niu.edu