Hi Sarah,
Student submissions can take up a lot of space. Understandably, it is easier to prevent this by restricting the assignment submission upload size. Find out more about assignments, using assignments, and assignment settings.
In your case, you have a few options, depending on your organisation's needs and compliance requirements.
- You could perform a course backup or an activity backup, and download these for safe keeping, and remove the course/activity from your site. Please refer to our article on restoring deleted courses for more information (especially the 100MB file limit). However, backup files do not allow easy or quick access to student work, if that is what you also need.
- If you need the course for another cohort, please refer to our information on course copy and reset course.
- If the course is currently being used, and you only want to remove the file submissions, then you could download the student submissions (in a zip file) and then delete the submissions. However, deleting a student submission will delete the grade assigned to that submission too! As a workaround, you could create an offline assignment just to enter the grades and feedback, to keep these in the system if you're removing the assignment with the large student submission files.
- If you only want to delete the submitted files, but leave the student assignment submission with the grades and feedback, then it is possible to edit the student submission and replace the uploaded file with another file (e.g. an 'empty' txt file). The issue with this, is that even though it is possible from a system perspective, it compromises the integrity of the student submission from an educational perspective. Also, it is exceptionally time consuming to edit each student's assignment submission.
There may be other options or possibilities, feel free to explore Moodle Docs for everything Moodle can do.
FYI, other articles related to storage in MoodleCloud are:
Hope this helps Kind regards,
Barbara