How to Prepare for Disastrous System Disruptions
Faculty
- Keep copies or originals of your course materials available locally or on an alternative site, Assignments, discussion board questions, even wikis and blog assignments should be off-site.
- Archive your course: use Control Panel, then Archive Course. bFree is a free reader that you can install in order to access your course archive. However, this utility does not give access to the Grade Center.
- Grades and copies of student works are also best kept off site, on a local computer or flash drive. To download your grades into an Excel spreadsheet, go to Grade Center, move your cursor to Manage, and choose Download.
- Keep a list of the students in your section(s) and their e-mails. You can get a list from Steve Castellano at stephen.castellano@lehman.cuny.edu if you provide him with your course and section number.
Students
- Keep the e-mails of your Instructors up-to-date.
- Keep copies of all the files and other projects that you have submitted through Blackboard.
- Keep a copy of your grades, and even, if appropriate, contributions to discussion board forums, blogs or wikis.
Tips on what to do when Blackboard becomes unavailable
Students
- E-mail your instructor for directions on how to continue your work in the course.
Faculty
- Send an e-mail to the students in your class and let them know about extended deadlines and other changes in your class schedule (if any).
- Also, consider attaching important files, like reading assignments, to this message.
- Or put these files on an alternate server such as:
- a personal server space which comes with most personal or home ISP (Internet Service Provider) contracts
- a free personal server space provided by various organizations or vendors, including Google Documents
- shared folders provided by file synchronization services like Sugarsync (free 45 day trial) or Dropbox (first two 2GB are free)
Last modified: Oct 13, 2011
