bCourses is UC Berkeley's official campus Learning Management System (LMS), using the Canvas platform. To enhance the management of bCourses and comply with the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) records management policies, the university has established a bCourses Course Retention Policy that applies to all users of bCourses, including instructors, students, and staff. Below is an overview of the policy and implementation timeline; review the Knowledge Base materials for more details.
bCourses Course Retention Policy
bCourses sites for academic courses are retained for seven years after the end of the Academic Year (AY) in which the course was offered. An academic course is one that has been provisioned by the Student Information System (SIS) and for which students register through CalCentral. bCourses sites for academic courses will be removed from bCourses annually every June (for example, a course taught in Fall 2021, AY2021–22, will be removed in June 2029).
The content that will be removed includes instructor-developed content (e.g., pages, modules, files), student submissions and grades (e.g., to assignments, quizzes), and student interactions (e.g., discussions, group work, collaborations). Once a course has been removed through this policy, the course and associated content are not recoverable for instructional purposes.
Media content stored in services integrated with bCourses may have a different retention policy. Kaltura content (i.e., content in the Media Gallery of a site or embedded using Kaltura) will remain in Berkeley’s Kaltura repository (available in the My Media of the Owner and Collaborators), subject to the retention policies of the Kaltura service.
Other manually-created bCourses sites that are not linked to a specific term/course, often referred to as Project Sites or Sandboxes, are subject to removal from the system if they do not have user activity for three years. If a Project Site or Sandbox course is active, it will continue to be available without any change of access. Inactive Project Sites will be removed annually every June, starting in June 2028. No backup Project Site will be available after the content is removed from bCourses.
Retention Policy Rollout Timeline
The bCourses Course Retention Policy will be initiated in two phases to allow sufficient time for the instructional community to prepare:
- Phase 1: bCourses sites for academic courses created in AY2013–14 through AY2019–20 will be archived for one year starting in June 2027, and removed from the platform in June 2028.
- Temporarily archived courses will be put in a read-only state; all enrollments, including the instructors’ enrollments, will be moved under “Prior Enrollments” and the course card/link to the site will be removed from the Dashboard for all users. Instructors will be unable to enter or edit grades, add people, send messages, or add or edit course content. However, instructors will continue to be able to view and copy course content—including importing content into new course sites.
- Phase 2: Starting in June 2028, and occurring annually every June:
- Academic courses will be removed from bCourses seven years following the close of the Academic Year in which they are taught — starting in June 2028 with courses created in AY2020–21.
- Project Sites that do not have user activity for three years will be removed annually every June, starting in June 2028.
Instructor Notifications
Instructors of Record will receive email alerts starting two years in advance of any content removal from bCourses, and impacted sites will contain a banner with removal details. All communications will provide options for how instructors can preserve their bCourses content and retain student records.
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. If you have questions about this policy, please reach out to the bCourses Service Team at bcourseshelp@berkeley.edu.