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Policy

Course removal and archiving policy for the management of the Learning Management System – LEARN@PolyU (理學網)

Course removal and archiving policy for the management of the Learning Management System – LEARN@PolyU (理學網)

Background

The Learning and Teaching Committee sends a message to all staff with teaching duties at the beginning of each academic year as a reminder of the importance of compliance with the copyright law. The Intellectual Property Department of the Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region issued a booklet -- Copyright in Education in Hong Kong – which specifies that any work should only be stored in a platform that requires authentication for a period of time which is just long enough for the intended teaching or learning purpose. The maximum allowed period is 12 months. In order to comply with the copyright law, the university has decided to adopt an archiving model allowing teachers and students access to their Blackboard course materials for up to one academic year (12 months).

Based on the understanding of the copyright law, the Working Group on Development and Operation of eLearning devised an archiving policy to support an automatic process to facilitate the archiving operation (in order to help teachers to deal with the copyright issues).

Automatic course removal and archiving Process (Begins at commencement of 2017/18 academic year)

Taking active measures to facilitate compliance and prevent copyright infringement, an automatic course removal and archiving process will be implemented in LEARN@PolyU (理學網) at the beginning of each semester.

  • All courses being taught will remain on the system for one academic year and then will be automatically archived and stored in an on-premise storage system
  • All data and materials in these archived courses will be removed on the first day of the subsequent semester
    g.: on the first day of Semester 2 of 2017/18, the courses that were taught in the Semester 2 of 2016/17 academic year will be removed from LEARN@PolyU (理學網).
  • The archived course will be kept in the storage system for 5 academic years.
  • There will be a service for course instructors who wish to restore archives by sending an enquiry (with Course ID and retention period) to the ITS Help Centre. The specific course will be restored in a separate system for the instructor to retrieve data in the course.
  • As the restoration process takes time, the best practice to maintain access to materials in the courses is to keep an archive yourself [eLearning support website: Module Backup].
  • Non-teaching related courses such as Sandbox and Template courses will not be included in the course removal and archiving process.

Courses requiring more than 12 months’ teaching period

Course instructors can apply to retain their courses in the LEARN@PolyU (理學網) for longer than 12 months if there are no copyright materials in the courses. ITS will inform the course leaders and obtain their confirmation. The course instructors are recommended to send the request to HOTS one month prior to the archiving operation of that course. Application form can be downloaded via the following link. Please fill in the detail and submit it as an attachment to the HOTS to complete the application.
Blackboard Application Form – Course Retain

Restoration procedure

Archived courses will be kept in a local on-premise server for 5 academic years. Course instructors can send the restoration request to HOTS with the following information:

  • Course ID
  • Teaching year
  • Semester

Requests will be handled within two weeks. Courses will be restored in a staging server for the instructors to retrieve data in the course in a three months activation period. The course will be automatically removed after the activation period.