Purpose

The purpose of this schedule is to define how long academic courses and organizations on the University’s Learning Management System (LMS) remain active. This includes full course content, grades, and all student work maintained on the LMS.

Scope

This schedule covers all official academic courses and organizations contained in the LMS managed and/or maintained by Suffolk University.

Guiding Principles

This schedule is guided by the following principles:

• Retain LMS data for a period of time which faculty, staff and students find adequate and useful.
• Optimize the performance of the LMS.
• Ensure the cloud storage space is used efficiently, reduce the probability of exceeding contracted storage amount resulting in additional fees.

Expedited Retention Schedule

The University will expedite the course archive and deletion schedule. We will begin by revising the interval that courses will remain active on the LMS resulting in a change from three (3) years to two (2) years after the completion of the semester. This process will address the ongoing Blackboard online data storage overages and the resulting costs.

Starting in Spring 2022, courses will remain active on the LMS for two (2) years after the completion of the semester. Every Spring semester, all courses with end dates greater than two years will be archived to university network storage hosted by Suffolk University and will no longer be accessible via the active LMS.

After the courses have been removed from the LMS, a formal request via the IT Service Desk (ServiceDesk@suffolk.edu) is required. Access to archived courses is only guaranteed for two past academic years for restoration purposes. After this grace period, the archived files will be purged from the active LMS due to increased storage costs.

Background

Suffolk University has four years of active academic courses and organizations including the current academic year (2021-22) active in the learning management system (LMS), currently Blackboard Learn 9.1 (SaaS). This has compromised the performance of Blackboard and increased the cost of cloud storage space to an unsustainable amount.

Instructors and/or departments are encouraged to establish a method for long-term retention of course data beyond four years (2 years in Blackboard plus 2 years in archives).

Related Record Retention Schedules

This retention schedule accommodates related retention schedules for Academic Program Administration Records (2 years) and Graded Work (1 year).

Deactivation Schedule

**Academic year cycles begin in June.

Academic courses and organizations from the academic years spanning 2016-18 will be deactivated one week after the end of the spring semester on May 21, 2021. These courses will remain available in the archives until May 2022, then they will be deleted.

Starting with the 2019-20, courses and organizations will be deactivated two years after their completion every Spring. A reminder will be sent through Blackboard before the deactivation date.

Archives and the New LMS

Suffolk University has chosen Canvas as their new learning management system. This will be available beginning the summer of 2023. This data retention schedule will still apply. The most recent two academic years of data will remain active in the LMS, and the previous two years will be backed up and archived based on the new LMS requirements.