Course Availability and Deletion Policy

With the 2017 transition from Blackboard to Brightspace, courses on Brightspace will be made unavailable to students per the schedule below.

This schedule encourages students and instructors to take responsibility for maintaining personal copies of relevant course materials, instead of relying on Brightspace as indefinite storage.

(Note that summer courses are grouped with fall courses for the purposes of this schedule.)

One year after a course ends, the course will be made unavailable to students enrolled in the course.   The course will remain available to instructors associated with the course.

Example: A Spring 2024 course will be available to students through the end of Spring 2025.  It will be made unavailable at the start of Summer 2025.

In current state, all courses on the platform are retained indefinitely. This may change, so faculty are encouraged to utilize the export functionality to maintain their own records of course content. 

Some caveats:

• Once a course is no longer available to students, an instructor can elect to override this change by contacting brightspace@vanderbilt.edu. Note that an instructor cannot make a course available to a single student—the course is either available to all enrolled students or none.
• Exceptions to the standard availability and deletion schedule can be requested by instructors and school administrators. Exception requests should be submitted via brightspace@vanderbilt.edu, and must be approved by representatives of the University Registrar and the Institute for the Advancement of Higher Education (AdvancED). 
• Alternate availability and deletion schedules can be set for individual colleges and schools, depending on local needs. Non-standard schedules should be drafted by the appropriate associate deans and approved by the Provost’s Office.
• Multimedia content stored in “My Media” is retained indefinitely as long as the University maintains a contract with Kaltura, the hosting company for that media.
• Any course content published to a learning repository or student portfolio on Brightspace will continue to be available after the course becomes unavailable.  Also, Brightspace allows students to easily download all downloadable instructor-generated content from a course to a .zip file for later or offline use.  For assistance with using these Brightspace tools, contact brightspace@vanderbilt.edu.
• The above policy does not apply to courses and organizations created manually on Brightspace, only courses automatically generated through integration with Vanderbilt student information systems. Manually created courses and organizations may be subject to periodic review to determine if they are still needed.

Policy updated August 8, 2024.