Moodle Help Guide

The Faculty LITS Advisory Committee considered retention of older courses on Moodle in March 2015. It was recognized that many courses are taught cyclically and having one or two prior iterations of the course to refer back to is valuable for faculty.  At the same time, Moodle is not built to be a storage vehicle and necessary upgrades and changes to the system mean that carrying materials over indefinitely creates a technological and administrative debt that saps resources better used on current support and enhancements.  

To balance those needs, LITS has settled on a course retention policy of 3 academic years plus the current year, with courses older than 6 semesters to be deleted in the summer (early August). In August 2022, we deleted courses from AY2019.

Saving Older Material

If there are materials from earlier course sites that you wish to save, there are two quick and easy options - or you can do both:

• Create a course backup file and save it to Google Drive or other storage. This file will later need to be restored within Moodle before you can pull out individual items, but it maintains the organization of the files more exactly.
• Download all instructor files and save the resulting folder full of files to your Google Drive or elsewhere. This allows you to pick-and-choose to re-use individual files, but does not maintain the course structure.

If you have organized your course with all weeks or topics visible on a single page, we also suggest you print or save that page, as a quick visual record of your organization of the course. Please see the Backup, Restore or Save From Courses section of this guide, at left, for instructions on backup file creation and instructor file download.

• If you experience an accessibility issue in Moodle, please report it using the Accessibility Barriers Form.
• Disability Services offers consultations and additional accessibility resources.
• We recommend use of the Robobraille document conversion tool when needed.