Welcome to the Blackboard Mailbag, where we feature a commonly asked question that has been hitting our mailbox recently: blackboard@fordham.edu. You’ll find an archive of all of the previous questions and answers on our fordham.edu/blackboard website.
Note: Features may change with future updates.
Fordham University pays Blackboard for file storage space. As a result, every item in your Blackboard classes costs something to store on Blackboard’s servers. In order to reduce costs, Fordham routinely removes old Blackboard courses and sets a 2 Gb file storage size on each Blackboard class.
If you upload large files to your Blackboard course/s (video files are often notoriously large files) you may eventually be blocked from other uploads until you reduce the size of your course files. (We highly recommend that you do not upload video files to Blackboard, but rather put a link to the video file in Blackboard, so students can access the video on Google Drive or Panopto, for example, rather than embedded within Blackboard itself.)
One way to see if there are files that you can delete without impacting your course is to go to Unused Files. Unused files allow instructors to find and delete course files that are not in use. You can locate the Unused Files tool in the three-dot menu on the Course Content page’s top-right corner:
Once you are in the Unused Files page, note how the default sorting is by file name:
Make sure to click on ‘File Size’ twice, in order to sort by the largest unused files at the top:
You can then delete any unused files and reduce the amount of file storage space your course requires.
For additional FAQs and resources about Blackboard, visit fordham.edu/blackboard, attend one of our workshops, sign up to meet with us on our EdTech Consultation Calendar via Zoom, or reach out to us with your availability and we will work with you to accommodate small groups and one-on-one sessions.
Have feedback or suggestions on features? Blackboard’s parent company Anthology hosts The Idea Exchange. This is a place specifically for Blackboard to track and manage enhancement requests. It allows for things like upvoting ideas and sharing development plans and statuses. You will need to create an account to access the Idea Exchange.