Removing a students work when they graduate

Removing a students work when they graduate

by Nikki Macfarlane -
Number of replies: 4

Hi all,

The courses we offer do not have start and finish dates - students can start at any time and take as long as they want to complete their courses. The problem I have is that when a student graduates, I want them to still be able to access the course manuals, but remove all their assignments (they are all uploaded pdf or docx files) and quizzes etc to reduce load on the storage. I have the manuals and the assignments in two separate courses.

I have tried to unenrol a student and enrol them into a separate course on graduation that does not include their assignments. However, this does not seem to remove their assignments that they previously uploaded in courses they are no longer enrolled in. The problem with this is we now have more than 10,000 students going back over the last 12 years which means a lot of assignments stored in the moodledata folder that are no longer needed.

Is there any way to remove a students submitted materials without having to manually remove each assignment?

Any suggestions welcome on how to achieve this. Thanks!

Nikki Macfarlane

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In reply to Nikki Macfarlane

Re: Removing a students work when they graduate

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
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Hi

You wrote:
> The problem with this is we now have more than 10,000 students going back over the last 12 years which means a lot of assignments stored in the moodledata folder that are no longer needed.

Then the obvious question is, what information do you need to keep going back 12 years? And the next question, can those 12 years be 20 years? Or, 40 years?

I have seen two approaches to the problem:
1. Keep full information for ever - in archives.
2. Extract what needed to be kept and delete the original.

1) means for example spawning a Moodle instance every year and making the last year's Moodle read-only, i.e. creating a true (separate) archive every year. Kind of rolling (multiplying) Moodle.

2) means creating and running reports to extract everything you want to keep from the outgoing batch and archiving them. Then delete the "full info". Moodle undergoes a "new year clean-up".

Reading your post, I think 1) is not feasible, due to the ever increasing storage need. So it may be 2) out of the two. May be there are other alternatives?
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In reply to Nikki Macfarlane

Re: Removing a students work when they graduate

by Ravi Murugesan -
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Hi Nikki - Have you checked out the 'Reset course' feature? On my Moodle 4.1 site, I can see that it offers granular control over what should be kept and what removed. For example, it looks like I can keep students enrolled in a course while removing student-generated data in any or all of the activity types in the course (such as submissions within 'Assignment' activities). 
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In reply to Ravi Murugesan

Re: Removing a students work when they graduate

by Shirley Gregorczyk -
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The Reset course feature works well to reset all students currently enrolled in the course. All or none. The feature still does not have the functionality to reset a student or groups of students currently enrolled in the course.
Kind Regards
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In reply to Nikki Macfarlane

Re: Removing a students work when they graduate

by Gregor McNish -
As course reset is all or none, you may wish to consider something like an annual assignments course, so that anyone starting in 2023 gets enrolled in the 2023 course to do their work. Then, when everyone who started in a certain year has finished, those courses can be deleted.
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