bCourse Data Retention Frequently Asked Questions

bCourses as a learning management system is not designed, equipped, nor contracted to be long-term or unlimited storage. The course retention policy will enable campus to continue to ensure instructional content is made available to students appropriately while also better managing the LMS:

• System health: UC Berkeley adopted Canvas as its official LMS in 2015. Since that time, the number of courses and storage space used has grown to unsustainable levels. Users with large course lists, especially instructors, may face performance and functionality issues.
• Privacy and security: Data should be retained in accordance with the University’s document retention best practices, which are rooted in retaining data for a specified period of time.
• Student access: The policy is intended to ensure a graduating senior continues to be able access to their freshman courses and allows for alumni grace period access.

• bCourses sites for academic courses will be removed in June seven years after the end of the Academic Year in which the course was offered.
• Manually-created bCourses sites that are not for official academic courses (Project Sites or Sandboxes) will be removed annually in June if they do not have user activity for three years.

Please refer to the What is the bCourse data retention policy? support page for up-to-date timelines. 

Course material that will be removed includes:

• Gradebook data
• Course-level data (student enrollments, student submissions including coursework, gradebook details and instructor feedback, and responses to discussions, quizzes, assignments, attachments, group work, and other items in the vendor’s Canvas database)
• Course content and design elements (syllabus pages, modules, pages, files, course-level question/item banks)

Content from a removed course cannot be copied to another course or downloaded after it has been removed from the site. 

• Video and media content stored in services integrated with bCourses does not fall under this policy. For example, Kaltura content in a course site (in the site’s Media Gallery or embedded in bCourses content via the Kaltura Embed option in the Rich Content Editor) will remain in Berkeley’s Kaltura repository (available in the Owner’s and any Collaborators’ My Media), subject to the retention policies of the Kaltura service.
• Courses generated by our student information system (SIS) or any other courses with students enrolled that have been offered within the past seven years.
• Other manually-created Project Sites or sandboxes that have been accessed in the past three years.

Media that has been embedded in bCourses pages will no longer be accessible via the course link, but may persist in its original posted format (i.e., on YouTube, stored in Google Drive, or in the Kaltura media repository).

Once a course has been removed through this policy, the course and associated content is not recoverable for instructional purposes. The course content is deleted from the platform, but some metadata may be retained in institutional databases for institutional analysis purposes.

• For site content and student records, use one of the options in the How do I preserve my bCourses content and records as an instructor? support article.
• For Kaltura media content, you can check to ensure that it is saved in your My Media or you can download your Kaltura media content for long-term storage. 

Students can download their assignment submissions and course files from each course. Please refer to the How do I save my bCourses content as a student? support article. 

The bCourses Course Retention Policy was drafted in accordance with University of California best practices with regard to data retention and approved by the Academic Senate on October 21, 2025.