Rollover of material for new academic year

Rollover of material for new academic year

by Marc Storey -
Number of replies: 12

Hi


I am new to Moodle and previous administrators have left with no handover some 6 month s ago,-everything I learn is from scratch with no prior knowledge.

The desire for the new academic year is to roll over the courses and content-last year all content was erased and teachers don't want this to happen again which I can appreciate. There was a course template that was used and those that want content erased will have to re adopt the same format as last year.

From someone who has no knowledge of this side can a community member tell me how this is done,  some say need to use CSV files ??? but for someone who has used Moodle for a month this is all over my head. I would appreciate some direction as there is no notes material left by those in situ.


many thanks


Marc



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In reply to Marc Storey

Re: Rollover of material for new academic year

by Emma Richardson -
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Couple of options:
1.  Courses can be backed and then restored to new courses.  Just do not include the users and they will be like a fresh copy of the course.
2.  Use a csv file to upload the new courses and reference the old courses as the template.

How to do this is all detailed in the documentation.  Just look up Course Back Up and Restore and Course Upload.
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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: Rollover of material for new academic year

by Marc Storey -

Hi


Thanks for your reply, I have successfully backed up and restored a course in a test area.


The question I have relates to CSV, I have only run through completing a csv file once how would I "reference the old course as the template".


again many thanks


Marc

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In reply to Marc Storey

Re: Rollover of material for new academic year

by Emma Richardson -
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https://docs.moodle.org/29/en/Upload_courses

Look for templatecourse

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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: Rollover of material for new academic year

by Antonio Crespo -

Good afternoon,


I am using a new installation of Moodle 2.91 and I am transferring the courses from the previous version (2.5.1+) using Upload Courses with a column for "backupfile" in the csv file.

The creation of the courses works smoothly!!!

However, when I try to update existing courses using the same method and csv file, but with other backup files of an updated version of some courses, the activities and resources get appended to those existing in the course, resulting in duplicated content.

I need to upload courses and to replace existing content if the course already exists in Moodle. I have tried all the possible combinations in the Import Options in the "upload courses" window, without results.

I have tried using "Create courses, or update existing ones"  and "Only update existing courses", 

In the Update mode, I must use "Update with CSV data only"

I have tried setting both to "yes" and to "no" Allow deletes, Allow renames and Allow resets with the same results.

I anticipate in thanking any help.



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In reply to Antonio Crespo

Re: Rollover of material for new academic year

by Colin Fraser -
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Hi Antonio, and I hope I am reading this right, when you talk about a new installation of v2.91, do you mean that you have created an entirely new Moodle? Totally vanilla? On a brand new server? Seriously suggest if you are changing servers, then just clone the whole Moodle to the new server, then upgrade the code to v2.91. (If your older Moodle is still intact, this is simple, migrate and change the settings in the config.php file.) Add in your course updates from there. If replacing courses, archive the older courses by changing their names and short names  move them to a new folder inside the Moodle, then add in the replacements. 

If you have created a new Moodle rather than upgrade your existing Moodle, then you have really done it the hard way. Moodle will always duplicate stuff and append where it is unclear what needs be done, it is just not that sophisticated yet - it will be, but not yet. In these situations, just update the core code, that does not have any effect on the courses or other materials in the Moodle database. It is a lot simpler and easier to not have to do anything to your courses except normal updates. There are three major elements of Moodle, the core code, the database and the course materials, of which, the core code is the easiest to change. To prevent duplication in these circumstances is a lot easier. 

Also suggest you have two Moodles, one to test things on first, before you make any changes to your production site. Set the name of the cookie prefix in Site Admin > Server > Session Handling to two different names, and you can run the Moodles side by side. with different IP addresses, or you can put them on different servers. This has saved me so much grief over the years. 

 


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In reply to Colin Fraser

Re: Rollover of material for new academic year

by Antonio Crespo -

Hi Collin,


Thanks for responding and for your suggestions. For several reasons we did not want to migrate from our previous version of Moodle, but preferred to do the 'hard way'.

I agree with you about how Moodle behaves when there is something unclear. I believe this is a different case because the options are in the 'upload courses' page for replacing the course content in a course, that already exists, with the content of the specified backup file. The problem is that it is not doing what it is supposed to do, instead of replacing, it is appending.

My question is if any of the moodlers have faced this problem and if they have come up with a solution.

Your suggestion about having a testing Moodle environment is also well taken as this is exactly what I have been doing for many years.



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In reply to Antonio Crespo

Re: Rollover of material for new academic year

by Colin Fraser -
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Believe it or not, Antonio, I just ran across this document in a completely different context... have a read and it might help - unless of course, you have already seen it. Scroll down and there are a couple of links to additional documents that may also help.

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In reply to Colin Fraser

Re: Rollover of material for new academic year

by Doug Moody -

Colin,

I am going to change servers when I start a new year. I don't have access to the moodledata folder on the old server, but I can make a backup of the old courses.

I am concerned that my backup will not contain the actual files that I use as reference files in my old courses, and I want to do the backup in such a way that it will include all the old files (word, pdf, mp4 videos, etc.)

So, my dilemma is needing to know in advance before I start this process if those files from the old courses will come over in the backup file. Do you know if they will?

Does anyone know? I really don't want to do this all by hand. Oh, and BTW, I will be upgrading to 2.9.1 from 2.8.6 in the process.

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In reply to Doug Moody

Re: Rollover of material for new academic year

by Emma Richardson -
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Yes, all of your course material should be included in the backup.  If you have a lot of video you might try using the experimental backup method as it works better with large backup files.  If you continue to have issues restoring large files, you might have to break it into a couple of files.

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In reply to Doug Moody

Re: Rollover of material for new academic year

by Colin Fraser -
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Hi Doug, it is not a big deal, there is a lot of advice on how to migrate your Moodle, and having run afoul of some very simple processes once or twice, it is not much fun.  Not having done a full site restore for a long time, I am not allowed near servers these days...mmm..., it is likely all different now, and I do not seem to be able to find any Moodle Docs on creating whole course flat files. The database is easy, but the real risk is the moodledata folder.  

Download and install a test site, then run backups from your production site, restoring them into your test site, see what is restored. It should all be there, everything, BUT... all paths in the mbz files are relative, which means that all restores are set to use the path in the config.php file, so make sure that is happening. Just do a couple of courses to test things out. 

From there, it should be fairly straightforward. 

Of course, you could just migrate your Moodle to the new server, then upgrade the codebase, rather than restore into a newer version, vanilla Moodle. This allows you to test things before upgrading and, once upgraded and tested, you can make the new site live without any disruption to your clientele.  


  

 

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In reply to Colin Fraser

Re: Rollover of material for new academic year

by Derek Chirnside -

Another option:

We get a mirror of one of our moodle sites on a portable HDD.  It's reasonably easy to get this set up to be a self contained unit.

I've discovered that no matter how many requests we have for users to save their absence and grade results on the dept server, there is still some need to look up olddata.

Mentally it gives a nice start to the year.

-Derek

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