Back to school – planning for the new academic year

There are a number of approaches institutions can adopt when planning their year-end activities within their Moodle site. Alongside a need for tidying up last year’s course spaces there is also a limited window of opportunity to prepare the new courses for the beginning of the new academic year. Most of the time we get asked what is the best option to deal with both these tasks? 99% of the time my response is, well it depends on your organisation’s policy for retention of student and teaching data! (Assignments, activity logs, resources etc.)

Having a policy and procedure in place is an essential part in successfully providing a service to your stakeholders that underpins all the academic activity within your college, university or school.

One of the things I’m always surprised about is the lack of importance placed on having processes and procedures embedded with internal departments that are critical in the delivery or consumption of data within your Moodle site. It is more often the case that the teams involved with the management of the VLE do not have close relationships and agreements with their MIS and networks teams. For instance if you use database enrolments to create course shells and manage enrolments in Moodle, do you have a timetable with these departments and an agreed process for managing the production of this data from year to year?

However it might be the case that you manage a site that only has manual course creation, enrolments and self-registration. How do you manage this data, do you know what courses to keep from one year to another?

So what are the practical approaches institutions can take in light of the information I have raised in this post?