Need help?
For questions, assistance, or to report an issue, please contact the COLTT Help Desk at 956-665-5327 or 956-882-6792.
Browse Help Articles Submit a TicketBest Practices - Limit Your Course Size
Audio/Video Files
Link to audio/video files rather than uploading them to your course. Instead, upload your audio/video files to Panopto and then link to them within your course. To learn more, see How to Upload Panopto Videos and How to Embed a Panopto Video.
Note: Be mindful of intellectual property rules and copyright. For example, it might not be legal to host a video from National Geographic in Panopto, even if you licensed it to use in a course.
Video Assignments
Assignments where you required students to submit audio or video files, can make your course size exceed the storage limit. Instead of creating a regular Blackboard assignment, we recommend using the Panopto Student Video Submission tool for any video assignments required in your course.
You may share these instructions with your students to get familiar with how to submit a Panopto video assignment through Blackboard.
Mashups/Embed Content
Use Mashups - upload slide decks to SlideShare, video to YouTube, or images to Flickr. You can easily embed these elements in your course with the Blackboard Learn Mashups tool. To learn more, see How to Create Mashups.
You may also embed content from other web services such as Vimeo, Issuu, and Flipsnack. Embedding allows you to display remotely saved content in your course without copying it to your course. To learn more, see How to Embed Remote Content in Blackboard.
Course Files
Look for large file sizes and unused files and folders that you can delete from your Course Files or Content Collection.
Reduce File Sizes
Before uploading, reduce file sizes for:
- Microsoft Office Files - Use the tools available in Microsoft Office to reduce file size for PowerPoint and Word files. The Reduce File Size option is located in the File menu. You can also save files as PDFs before uploading, which often makes smaller, read-only versions of the files.
- PowerPoint presentations - Save presentations as PDF files to reduce the size of large presentation files. Learn how to convert a presentation to PDF format.
- Images - Use a graphics program such as Photoshop to resize images for screen viewing before uploading.
- PDF’s - It is possible to reduce the size of your PDF files, without losing much in quality, using Adobe Acrobat Pro.
- Audio/Video - Use software to resample or trim audio/video files to reduce their size such as Audacity.
