Context freezing (of courses / categories) vs course backup, import and copying

Context freezing (of courses / categories) vs course backup, import and copying

by Przemek Kaszubski -
Number of replies: 5
Hi, not this question is best located here, but the problem considerably constrains my site management options, so I thought it could fall under UX after all.

In the admin experimental settings Moodle allows for context freezing :




I would like to use this feature to protect some older courses, prevent them from being changed while at the same time allow them to accessed by teachers and maybe also former students - just for review etc. So far so good.

HOWEVER, some teachers would like to copy these courses, back them up and download or simply import from when they are working on newer courses. IMPOSSIBLE. The "freezing' goes so deep it prevents any backup-like operations on the frozen courses. Now, I consider this a flaw, and would be willing to start a tracker issue to have them limitation removed.
Would there be any support for my idea and for the use case I'm describing?

Thanks for any help and kind regards,

Przemek
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In reply to Przemek Kaszubski

Re: Context freezing (of courses / categories) vs course backup, import and copying

by Bob Gilmore -
Im living in this forum today...

I was unaware of this feature! I would support being able to backup/restore a frozen course, perhaps have a role assignment that allows this?
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In reply to Przemek Kaszubski

Re: Context freezing (of courses / categories) vs course backup, import and copying

by Brett Dalton -
Picture of Moodle HQ team
Przemek this isn't the appropriate forum for this, the general Moodle forms probably would be. This functionality is listed as experimental as there are a number of issue such as the one you have highlighted that have not been implemented or addressed around context freezing. As bandwidth allows we may revisit experimental settings to assess their usage and what needs to be done to bring them to production or remove them from the system.
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In reply to Brett Dalton

Re: Context freezing (of courses / categories) vs course backup, import and copying

by Hugo Ribeiro -
I don't want to hijack the thread, but revisiting experimental settings would make a lot of sense IMHO. Most of them seem never to have been adequately finished while being very needed.
This said, I can only imagine how difficult it is to manage bandwidth, but I hope the PAG will help!
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In reply to Hugo Ribeiro

Re: Context freezing (of courses / categories) vs course backup, import and copying

by Przemek Kaszubski -
Well, this very feature - albeit being experimental - was considered CRITICAL for the Moodle 3.6 release - see: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-53566 .
It was also hailed as a useful tool for admins on the new features page for 3.6 : https://docs.moodle.org/36/en/New_features
I think it certainly deserves to be put back in the spotlight - there's great potential here.
So I too would hope that it might become a feature promoted by PAG.

BTW - I've just caught site of this Epic https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-63984 "Followups for Context Freezing", so I think I will add my suggestion there (or subscribe to an existing issue that comes close to my request).

Thanks for all the replies. Best wishes, Przemek
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