Bye Bye Blackboard; Hi, Sakai

[On Saturday, June 30, Duke University access to Blackboard course sites will expire. Digital Initiatives Librarian Hollie White offers some advice to help students, faculty and staff prepare for the transition to Sakai, Blackboard’s replacement system.]

For Students: Although the last four years of Blackboard content have been migrated to Sakai for faculty access, students will not see these past courses in Sakai. If you want to save some of your work from a previous course (such as final products from group projects) which used Blackboard, sign on to Blackboard before June 30 and find the class(es) from which you want to save material. Please remember that handouts and slides are the property of the faculty member and you should not copy, save, or redistribute these without permission from your instructor.

For Faculty: The last four years of Blackboard content has already been copied from Blackboard into Sakai. To explore your migrated classes, log in to Sakai. Classes will appear as tabs on the top of the Sakai screen. Most of your migrated content from Blackboard will be in the “Resources” or “Test/Quizzes” section for each Sakai course. Review what is in there and what is not in order to determine if the Sakai migration has preserved all the material that you would like to save from Blackboard (you may want to compare the Sakai content to Blackboard before June 30 in order to determine what is missing). For example, student content (such as wikis, blogs, discussion boards, and grades), could not be migrated and will have to copied and saved manually. Check Duke Law’s Sakai page for more details on how to save content manually.

For Staff and Teaching Assistants: If you assist a faculty member with course management, it may be beneficial to remind the instructor about the Blackboard-to-Sakai migration before the end of June. Faculty members may delegate the preservation of old Blackboard materials to you. Instructions about how to check for and transfer materials from Blackboard to Sakai can be found on the Duke Law Sakai page. If you need permissions to access a specific course in either Blackboard or Sakai, please contact Hollie White.

For more information on Sakai or questions about the migration process, please contact Duke Law’s Digital Initiatives Librarian, Hollie White.