Course Purge in Brightspace
- Aug 6
- 2 min read
As our Commonwealth University Brightspace ages, it grows considerably with the number of semesters and courses. For faculty who teach multiple sections of courses each semester, this can make navigating Brightspace difficult.
For this reason, and because PASSHE recommends a 3-year retention period for the LMS, CATS will begin a “soft purge” of courses older than the last 3 academic years.
The soft purge will not remove users from courses, but make affected courses inactive. This will make the courses invisible to anyone enrolled in them. During this phase, these courses will not be deleted, so if faculty discover they did not export these courses, they can reach out to CATS to request access. CATS will grant access for two weeks’ time in which the faculty can export any materials they need. After these two weeks, the course(s) will be made inactive again.
Once the soft purge phase is over, the courses in that state will be purged or deleted from Brightspace and will no longer be accessible to anyone.
The soft purge phase will be one full semester long. So, if a course is in the soft purge phase in Winter, it will be purged and inaccessible the following Summer session.
Course Purge Timeline
CATS will begin this process in December 2026 after the Fall semester, to give faculty time to export old courses as needed. Instructions for course export are in this helpful article in our Help Desk Knowledge Base.
SOFT PURGE – December 14, 2026-May 9, 2027
2022-2023
and ALL Migration Container courses
FULL PURGE – May 10, 2027
2022-2023
and ALL Migration Container courses
SOFT PURGE – May 10, 2027 – August 15, 2027
2023-2024
FULL PURGE – August 16, 2027
2023-2024
The next purge schedule will begin May 2028, and so on.
If you have any course "sites" in Brightspace that live in the migration containers, please let us know so we can move them to the "ongoing" or other appropriate container in Brightspace. We may be moving some of these in the coming months. If you don't see your site in that tab of the widget, check the course list by clicking the waffle icon at the top of the page and searching for the course. It will still appear there as normal.
Comments