There is an official quota of 1 GB per course in Blackboard. The average course size is 178 MB and most people will not notice this quota. However, for those of you with large files such as PowerPoints, images, or CSV files, it is important to reduce the sizes of the files.
You can check your course quota usage and if you are close or over usage, you are responsible for reducing the size of your content and we are happy to offer advice and assistance. For questions, users can contact tips@uark.edu. In some circumstances users can request an increase to the quota through bbadmin@uark.edu and we will review the content usage and increase the quota when needed.
Important Note: Once you have reduced the size of your content and uploaded the new content in Blackboard, it is important to either overwrite the old files or else delete the old files from the content areas, the content collection, AND the recycle bin. The second part of this post contains instructions for deleting the files from the content collection and recycle bin.
Video and Audio Files
All video and audio files should be uploaded to Kaltura, our media streaming server. This allows us to save space in Blackboard while also providing a better viewing experience for students. Kaltura adds captions to videos and adjusts based on the viewer’s internet connection and device.
If you have voiceover PowerPoints, we recommend that you
- save these as MP4s (second section of this post shows you how)
- Then upload to Kaltura
- You can then deploy them in your course
- Don’t forget to delete these files from the course as well as from the content collection and recycle bin (second section of this post)
If you have large images in your PowerPoints, there are a few ways to reduce the size. This post from Microsoft gives some suggestions for reducing image sizes.
Reducing File and Image Sizes
You can reduce file sizes in several different ways.
Here are some recommendations for reducing the size of different file types:
- Word Documents
- Excel Spreadsheets
- PowerPoints
- PDFs
- You can also “zip” these files as well as large CSV files, access and other database files, InDesign files, and Photoshop files to upload to Blackboard.
In some cases you need to reduce the size of images. The links above instruct you on reducing images sizes in those documents but sometimes you need to reduce a jpeg or png image file. There are several online tools you can use to compress images but you can also do thisby looking at the image properties and in the advanced settings there is usually an option to compress or reduce the size of the image.
Removing and Updating (Overwriting) Files
When you compress or upate your content it is important to either delete or overwrite the file in Blackboard. If you just delete the file in the content area, it is still in the course content collection. One option is to overwrite the file. This replaces the existing file with the new file. If you do not overwrite or delete the file in the course, in the content collection and in the recycle bin, there are now two files in the course and it is taking up more space instead of less.