As for emailing my professor that is a good idea, but not a scalable solution for me considering my number of courses and for her, considering the number of students she has.

1. Server space. Even at a small institution, the space fills up quickly. If your servers are hosted with Blackboard, they start you with 20G of space… my very small 2 year college is using 60G as of now. Every bit of space is more money, so older courses are going to be archived and taken off the server.

2. Functionality. I have complaints from both students and instructors if they see last semester’s classes. It crowds their course menu (particularly for instructors who may be teaching 5 courses a semester… a few semesters and they are wading through English 101s trying to find this semester’s course).

Bottom line… if you see something you want to keep as reference material, download and save it.

Have you ever thought about emailing your professor and asking her for her examples again? I’m sure she would be thrilled to know that you paid attention and found her materials valuable.

I like your comparing this to a textbook or handout. The administrators are thinking of this as the online equivalent of a classroom. So you should only have access during the term.

On the other hand, you could probably ask your instructor for the documents (though my personal suggestion is to just download it all yourself, as that’s what I do). Blackboard is still terrible software though. I’ve experienced both the student and the instructor side of it and I think the instructor’s view is *worse* than the student’s.

On the brighter side, Blackboard’s patents got invalidated recently (probably pending [another] appeal): https://community.desire2learn.com/d2l/lms/blog/view_userentry.d2l?ou=1796&ownerId=6961&entryId=303/

Hopefully something much, much better will supplant them (something that doesn’t load Java, for example)

As for your statement “Once the class is over, you should not expect access to its resources”… you did not explain why I should not expect access (the post and comments above detail why I think I should).

Finally, as for doing something about it, believe me, I will. However, it was necessary to first write this post as it has given me the chance to clarify my thinking and to gain the insights from others that I will need in order to be successful.

Your comment does still point to the fact that in part, it is still Blackboard’s fault. When you develop software you always have to keep in mind what it leads your users to do. The affordances that Blackboard provides are wrong, it encourages instructors to waste space. Doing things like allowing content reuse would have made instructors and system admin more likely to keep the courses around. This failure should have been avoided not because of them worrying about openness, but rather they should have known that space would be limited (space is always limited). Minimizing space usage should have been a large priority.

The true irony is that it was my search for a “System Requirements Specification” document (the very document that would have led to space saving being prioritized) that made me write this post in the first place!

Having said that, it’s common for server admins to restrict access to past semesters for (1) political reasons (as you’ve suggested), or (2) hardware/storage reasons.

Having worked with LMSs for a number of years, I can tell you that reason #2 is actually more a problem of process than of necessity; that is, LMS storage space is often overconsumed by faculty who store multiple copies of files, including course backups, within their courses–and duplicate them each semester. Also, the LMSs rarely allow for any sort of resource sharing, so if I have a great MP4 that’s 55mb, and I use it in my ENGL 1010 course, I might have a copy of that stored on the server for each semester I’ve taught that course. And if other instructors teach different sections and want to use that MP4? Well, silly Bb wants them to store their own copy. (I know some of you Bb experts want to say the word “Template” right now, but don’t even try it.)

Now there are other issues with Bb that are less easily dealt with re. openness, and those constitute much of the core of my complaints about the system.

As for the reasons you are looking for, I believe can be found in the economics of onwership and its correlating perceptions that occurs in the generation gap.

On one hand, you have the students who believe that resources posted online are contributory in the overall cost of the course and hence, the information should belong to those who ‘pay’ for it alongside with the textbook for the course.

On the other, you have profs who (and this is a wide generalization) use blackboard for the convinience of posting information (or maybe required by the university) and assignments. This perception takes into account that the profs believe that information posted on Blackboard is still, technically ‘theirs’ and hence hold the right to retract the information.

The economics behinds ownership then asks: is online property as valuable as physical property? Of course, but it requires a re-definition of ownership.

ie. read news on Kindle retracting e-book http://www.topnews.in/orwell-s-books-erased-amazon-s-kindle-buyers-enraged-2190414

I also think that these occurances are also a result of the perception that students, who have grown up in the digital age, expect online information to always be there and to build on pre-existing knowledge vs. some profs, who would expect students to print out the handout provided, having less expectancies of the online world as students.

I have come to the stage where I print out everything that is provided on Blackboard to avoid frustrations like these after my entire online distance-ed music course disappeared overnight.

Until changes are made, the bottom line for me is: if you can’t beat em, join em.