Howard Miller

I do. As I mentioned above, one option is to create a new, restrictive role.

 

If you unenrol someone from a course, Moodle actually deletes all their grades (if you don't believe me, look at the logs in the database). It's doesn't delete the grade history, however. If a plugin doesn't exist (I can't think of one), one could be written. The first problem I can think of, is how do you know which courses to include if the students are no longer in them? You're kind of fighting against Moodle's view of the world. 

 

I'm assuming that you're unenrolling students. You haven't actually said what you do at the "end" of a course.  

This has always been a limitation of Moodle. It's is very course-centred. There isn't much that works "across" courses.

No. If a student is not enrolled in a course then they cannot see the grades for that course. There's no concept of a "final grade" somehow exported from a course.

I'm a huge fan of Docker for running test/dev instances of Moodle. It completely isolates PHP, the web server, the database, the cache and so on from the OS. The flexibility is great. BUT... it's something else to learn and it's not at all trivial.

It would have been wrong of me not to mention it, though. Like Ken always promotes Git - and you can get into a proper mess with that, too

This is the fun and games with LTS versions of Linux. You may be happy to have the advantage of not rebuilding your server but it's unlikely that the versions of some server software it came with will "survive" the lifetime of the basic LTS build. PHP 8.3 may be the latest *now* but won't be in 5 years time (although Ubuntu 24.04 will still be supporting it).

This is just one thing to consider. What can you leave to LTS and what might change and can better be provided through a PPA, a container or whatever?

I've said it before and will say it again - you can get a well-paid job as a Linux sysadmin

I'm reasonably sure that you can't do that. There's nothing in the database tables that can directly tell you who is "active".

You can only do that by (for example) checking the 'lastaccessed' time in the mdl_user table. You can assume that anybody whose lastaccess was no more than 5 minutes ago is probably active. If that helps.