UH-Deleting unused course areas
In Finnish: HY-Kurssin elinkaari In Swedish: HU-Moodle-kursens livtid
The number of Moodle course areas has grown with the increased interest and educational use of Moodle. Teachers and departments create new course areas for each course implementation separately, i.e. for example for ICT driving license courses autumn 2010 and 2011, which is often the most meaningful way to do. But the results of this are that there are many unused course areas that were created for and used in already past courses. Additionally and as a consequence, many course areas have similar names, and users may get confused in searching the list for the actual one. It is more difficult to find the accurate course areas among the large number of course areas. Therefore it was considered meaningful to hide and even delete old and unused course areas which also shortens teachers' My home list of course areas. Therefore, an automatic process of gradually deleting unused course areas was decided for and taken to use in Autumn 2011.
The idea is that course areas that a) have not had visits for 12 months b) have a start date older than 12 months are investigated on. They are not hidden or deleted automatically, but instead users with teacher privileges on the course area receive email notification on the situation. Teachers will receive in total at least three notifications before the course area is deleted. The stages are as follows:
- Stage 1: if the course area is still open for students, it will be closed, i.e. students cannot use the course area anymore.
- Stage 2: the course area is locked for teachers, i.e. teachers can see the course area but not use it anymore.
- Stage 3: the course area is deleted
Teachers receive an email notification two months before each stage. If the course area is still in educational use, the deleting process can be postponed in Stage 1 by editing the setting Course start date via Settings -> Edit Settings and after Stage 2 by asking for the category change from moodle@helsinki.fi. Note that the start date cannot be in future if students should be able to access the course area.
If the course area includes many teachers, please agree on the course area future need with the teacher responsible for the course. If you are the teacher responsible for the course and want to speed up the process by getting your course areas deleted at once, please contact moodle@helsinki.fi.
