Dear all, as I might already have written elswhere, keeping "old" courses is one thing and "archiving" is a completely other thing. I am speaking out of the perspective of a Moodle-Admin working with several Universities on one Moodle-Server.
- keeping old courses is ok as long as they do not orphan completely, i.e. teachers and students still being able to access them
- this means doubling the number of courses each new semester's or year's term, which in turn means a lot of work to copy the courses and creating new categories with new semester's or year's numbers
- this way Moodle becomes really cluttered with lots of courses and I had to change my data disk more than once in the last few years
- on the other hand keeping and continuing to develop always the same course would keep Moodle clean and lean and the URLs of the courses would never change, unless there really is a reason to freeze up a course and continue with a fresh copy of it
whereas
- archiving can be a must if you have laws that force you to keep "old" courses for 5 or even 10 years
- if you grade in your courses, the students may have the right to ask for a revision of their grades at the end of the term. Depending on your laws this could go on until they are graduated and leave your school.
- anyway, archiving means putting the courses aside for a longer period, lets say 5 to 10 years, which implies a lot of things
- since 2004 I changed my server from Moodle 1.5 to Moodle 1.8, 1.9, and last August to 2.3
- so you would first of all have to keep running systems alive for 5 to 10 years
- or you would have to migrate all stuff to newer systems all the time
- same thing if you store/export data to CDs, DVDs, Tapes, or any other data-support/drive, you would have to keep them alive and refresh data and suppport/drive
So keeping old courses either in accessible format or as a backup-zip file would have an impact on the amount of data you would have to store. A backup-zip file being the most compressed and economic solution. On the other hand a backup-zip file would have to be restored to become accessible. A Moodle 1.9 Backup-zip file can not easily be restored on a Moodle 2.x Server, so best would be to freeze also the systems capable of reading/restoring your backup-zip files.
Actually I do not "archive" because I do not even know the laws of my own universtities. I only allow teachers to leave their courses as is, when they explicitely ask me to do so, and if they really have reasons to do so. Courses nobody will use any more are moved to a special category I named ToDelete. I leave the courses there for another 6 months or so, just in case students or teachers need access again. But I remove teachers and set the courses to not available for students, so as to remove the links from their myCourses lists.
What regards the myCourses Block, I also wrote my two cents in other threads. The students and teachers should be able to show/hide their courses as they like. I developed my own myCourses Block for other reasons originally but my last version for Moodle 2.3 offers hiding/showing of courses. An Admin-Option can be set to hide courses that are older than the give number of months/days, and the user can at any time click to show all courses where he/she is enrolled in or only the recent/actual ones.
siteNavigation is in the Modules&Plugins Database and myCourses is still in its thread in these forums.
Rosario