Blackboard Collaborate Ultra (Recordings) - Media Management Process (updated)
The University of Wisconsin System (including Madison) has adopted a new media management process governing how long Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings are kept on Blackboard servers. The new process began in December 2020 and was extensively revised in January 2021. This process was necessitated by dramatic increases throughout 2020 in the volume of Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings and strict vendor limits on the amount of storage allocated for these recordings.
New Recordings - Course Related
Starting on 01/04/2021, the following process will manage new web conference recordings created in UW System's Canvas-integrated instances of Blackboard Collaborate Ultra.
- Recordings set to allow public access (the default setting) will be copied to Kaltura within 24 hours and then deleted from Blackboard's servers 45 days after creation.
- Recordings set to not allow public access will not be exported to Kaltura and will be deleted from Blackboard's servers after 45 days after creation.
Older Recordings - Course Related
In December 2020, the following Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recording processes went into effect to clean up recordings made prior to 01/04/21:
- Recordings on the D2L-integrated instances of Collaborate Ultra were deleted from Blackboard's servers on 12/01/2020. For the most part, these recordings had been inaccessible to instructors and students since the final migration away from D2L in June 2020.
- Recordings made on Canvas-integrated instances of Collaborate Ultra prior to 08/01/2019 were deleted from Blackboard's servers on 12/02/2020. These recordings are by-in-large course-related and had already exceeded an 18-month records retention period.
- Recordings made on Canvas-integrated instances of Collaborate Ultra after 08/01/2019 and set to allow public access (the default setting) were copied to Kaltura and then deleted from Blackboard's servers.
- Recordings made on the Canvas-integrated instances of Collaborate Ultra after 8/01/2019 but set to not allow public access by 01/01/21 (despite warnings and lists sent to campus administrators) were not exported to Kaltura and were deleted from Blackboard's servers.
Managing Migrated Recordings
Regardless of when the recordings were made, the following processes describe how instructors can manage their Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings which have been migrated to Kaltura:
- Users with Teacher-based roles should use the Course Media and Course Media Settings tools in their Canvas courses to manage recordings which have been copied to Kaltura.
- Behind the scenes, a Kaltura account is created for each Canvas course with migrated Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings. These Course Media accounts are assigned ownership of the recordings in Kaltura. They follow this naming convention: CourseMedia-[InstanceID]-[CourseID] (ex: CourseMedia-11830-380697).
- Users with Teacher-based roles are given Co-Editor and Co-Publisher rights to the copied recordings in Kaltura through membership in a Kaltura Group created for instructors of that specific course. These Kaltura Groups follow this naming convention: CourseMedia-G-[InstanceID]-[CourseID] (ex: CourseMedia-G-11830-380697).
Excluded Recordings
Recordings made on the My Wisconsin Portal-integrated instance and the manually-created instances of Collaborate Ultra are currently outside of the scope of this media management process. They represent a small percentage of total recordings. Users are encouraged to manually delete unneeded recordings.
Blackboard Collaborate Original (the Java-based interface) has been retired by the vendor, and all Blackboard Collaborate Original recordings will be deleted by the vendor no later than June 2021.
Deleted Recordings
Users can recover a Collaborate Ultra recording deleted from Blackboard's servers by submitting a ticket to Blackboard Collaborate Support within 30 days of the deletion. For more information, see the Recovering Deleted Recordings guide.