Deleting unused course areas

The number of Moodle course areas has grown with the increased interest and educational use of Moodle. Teachers and departments create new course areas for each course implementation separately, i.e. for example for ICT driving license courses autumn 2010 and 2011, which is often the most meaningful way to do. But the results of this are that there are many unused course areas that were created for and used in already past courses. Additionally and as a consequence, many course areas have similar names, and users may get confused in searching the list for the actual one. It is more difficult to find the accurate course areas among the large number of course areas. Therefore it was considered meaningful to hide and even delete old and unused course areas which also shortens teachers’ mymoodle list of course areas. In addition, the process prepares for Moodle 2 migration in summer 2012.

In autumn 2011, the automatic process of gradually deleting unused course areas was started. The idea is that course areas that a) have not had visits for 12 months b) have a start date older than 12 months are investigated on. They are not hidden or deleted automatically, but instead users with teacher privileges on the course area receive email notification on the situation. If the course area includes many teachers, please agree on the course area future need with the teacher responsible for the course. Teachers will receive in total at least three notifications before the course area is deleted. The stages are as follows:

  • Stage 1: if the course area is still open for students, it will be closed
  • Stage 2: the course area is moved to a hidden category and hidden from the MyMoodle page but is still accessible via the course area address
  • Stage 3: the course area is deleted

Teachers receive an email notification two months before each stage. If the course area is still in educational use, the deleting process can be postponed in Stage 1 by editing the Course start date at Administration/Settings and after Stage 2 by asking for the category change from ok-moodle@helsinki.fi. Note that the start date cannot be in future if students should be able to access the course area.

If you are the teacher responsible for the course and want to speed up the process by getting your course areas deleted at once, please contact ok-moodle@helsinki.fi.