Archiving and restoring forums

Archiving and restoring forums

by Philip Latham -
Number of replies: 3

Hi,

I've dabbled on the Moodle.org and Moodle demo courses but am new to having access to my own Moodle server.

A question about features of the Moodle forums:

Is it possible to archive Moodle Forums?

If so, how are these archives accessed or restored.

Philip Latham

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In reply to Philip Latham

Re: Archiving and restoring forums

by A. T. Wyatt -
Greetings, Philip!

I apologize if I am going off in a totally different direction, but it seems to me that you might be coming from Blackboard or some similar software? I have only worked with BB, but in that LMS, many instructors used a single or small group of forums for a whole semester. In this situation, it was necessary to have an archive tool to get many of the threads split off and placed somewhere other than the current ongoing discussion! Otherwise it took a LONG time to load on some connections.

Moodle does not really archive discussions in that way. Instead, you simply set up a different forum. You can have as many as you need to get you through the semester and they are presented as an integrated part of the topic (rather than in a completely different place, as in Blackboard). So this allows you to approach forums somewhat differently. Maybe more chronologically and thematically.

In moodle, your forum will be backed up if you back up and restore your course. The threads are stored with the users, so if you restore your course for next year or next semester WITHOUT the users, you will have the forum and the introduction to the forum (where you put the prompt), but none of the material your students added.

Does that help?

atw
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In reply to A. T. Wyatt

Re: Archiving and restoring forums

by Philip Latham -

Thanks AT,

Well spotted..., I am a former Blackboard user.

I'm aware of the way Moodle allows you to add a discussion forum as a resource which is linked to from any topic. This is a good feature and an advantage over Blackboard's separation of the discussion forums into a specific area.

We run instances of the same courses each semester and want to keep a record of all the discussion forums posts from previous semesters and have them accessible to students enrolled in the current semester. However, we don't want to just continue the formum leaving all the posts there because this will clutter things up.

We are currently using a freeware discussion forum called Snitz, which has limited functionality . At the end of the semester we copy and paste all the of the discussion forum posts into a Word document and save them as HTML then publish them on our website and let current students know where they are. This is a lot of work. I was hoping that Moodle would provide an automated way of achieving this.

Is it possible in Moodle to create a forum called "Previous semester's forums" and move all the forum posts from that semester into this forum?

Philip

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In reply to Philip Latham

Re: Archiving and restoring forums

by A. T. Wyatt -
I don't think that is possible in moodle. I like the idea of being able to export a record!

I put it in as a feature request: MDL-9469

If you make an account in the issue tracker, you can vote for it!

atw
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