Our university actually makes a new moodle instance every semester. You can do this several ways, by judicious copying of your database prior to upgrade or by simply restoring all the courses to a new instance. Depends on how many courses you have and how many people you have to do the work.
We put an html block on the front page of the site and it contains links to previous semesters. Instructors and students can go back to any of them to see what they did. Because we use LDAP, the passwords are all the same no matter when the course was originally taken. We stop the cron and backups after we create the official backup of the instance so that it does not take system resources.
We chose to do this because if you keep all the semesters on the SAME instance, it gets awfully hard to navigate the "my courses" block. We wanted the access, but also to separate it from the current instance.
Hopefully, you will get some other scenarios posted here in response to your question.
atw
Re: Thoughts about what to do with course from previous terms?
by A. T. Wyatt -
Number of replies: 0