Hello,
What is the recommended way to re-run a course in Moodle? For example, let's say the course is to rerun with identical courses, quizzes, assignments, documents, etc... is there a way to register new students, and remove all submissions from students to minimize setup work for the teacher? Any hints or tips on how other schools handle this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Jason
1. BACKUP the course.
2. Then RESTORE it with a NEW NAME and WITHOUT the user data.
It REALLY works - saves HOURS!
I have had the same question and hope to get some discussion going on options (or potential upgrades). Drew's solution works if you (a) don't teach that many courses or (b) "retire" courses after running them. Otherwise, you will end up with dozens of the same course listed over and over again. We don't yet teach that many courses, but we intend to, and we want to save our old courses.
I have been using "Groups" so that different course instances do not appear as new courses. For example, for our Course "Basic Lawyering Skills" we have for Groups "Basic Lawyering Skills 2005," "Basic Lawyering Skills 2006a," etc.
However, this is less than ideal because each time we run the courses, we need to update all the dates, etc. associated with each course. That then screws up the course dates for previous participants, which is OK so long as we are not running two overlapping but not coterminous courses.
Does anyone else use Moodle in the way we describe and have a better solution?
Is there then, an easy way to change due dates for assignments, as we run our courses by semester, and it would be cool to be able to use a single command to backdate all the dates in the course by the same amount as the start date (rather than manually changing every assignment)
I too would be keen to discover an easy way to remove the assignments from previous users as we have limited resources at this stage, and I'm concerned about disk space. If I delete a course after creating a new course in the way you suggest, will the user data be retained in the database and the assignment files be left in the data directory?
This really depends on what you want to have happen as a tutor. In our college different tutors have different needs. So for example a) some do not want to keep anything from the year just finished, b) some want their old course to be available for a short while so that previous year students can still access it AND so that the tutors still have access to assignment submissions, etc
In the case of a) we encourage the use of the Reset facility (in the Administration block in version 1.9 and I believe in some earlier versions). This lets you remove students in one go and allows you to selectively clear down the data for activities like forums and assignments.
In the case of b) we backup the course and then restore it to a hidden category. The tutors then use the Reset facility as above.
A few extra things to say:
I hope this helps
