Liberation of LMS-siloed Instructional Data

This paper presents an initiative to extract and repurpose instructional content from a series of Blackboard course shells associated with IMLS-funded boot camp events conducted in June of 2021, 2022, and 2023. These events, facilitated by ten faculty members and attended by 68 fellows, generated valuable educational materials currently confined within proprietary learning management system environments. The objective of this project is to enable broader access and reuse of these resources by migrating them to a non-siloed, static website independent of the original Blackboard infrastructure. We describe our methodology for acquiring and validating the data exports, outline the auditing procedures implemented to ensure content completeness and integrity, and discuss the challenges encountered throughout the process. Finally, we report on the current status of this ongoing effort and its implications for future dissemination and reuse of educational materials.