Moodle and Web 2.0

After you’re instructors have delivered a course, many times it is important to keep it’s associated data safe and secure for future reference and for required archiving purposes. This could be a simple solution for an organization with only one Moodle installation and a few courses, but it can quickly become a burden if you are responsible for multiple installations and a large collection of courses.

The folks over at Moodle Partner Catalyst IT have put together what appears to be a very slick and comprehensive solution to this problem with their CourseBank service. From Moodle.org:

The CourseBank plugin is an admin tool which integrates with the Coursebank cloud backup service. CourseBank allows administrators to push their Moodle Course backups into managed cloud storage and access these backups on demand through the Coursebank interface.

This type of service could offer significant value through time and cost savings by eliminating the need for on site backup infrastructure and staff and processing time overhead. In order to use the service, you do need to register for a license at https://account.coursebank.biz/.

There comes a time for all things to end – and for some of us that means the courses we teach and maintain for our student body. Rather than destroying these resources and their associated data, in today’s digital age, it is always a great idea to just back them up for archiving.

Matthew Davidson has release a plugin – very aptly named – called Course Archiver that accomplishes just that. It is a winner of an Early Bird Moodle 3.0 award and looks to be a great resource, especially for those Moodlers who maintain a large catalogue of courses that need to be updated, modified or changed regularly.

I especially like the fact that you can mass hide or archive courses, rather than being forced to do this one by one. Once you have indicated that you will hide or archive a course, an email is sent to the course owner letting them know when this will happen.

From the comments, the only real hiccup / issue that I can see is the fact that the documentation doesn’t currently provide a step by step about how to unarchive courses. However, because they are stored as zipped files, this should be a straight forward process for any experienced Moodler.

Acronis stellt den Ratgeber "Backup für Dummies" als kostenloses E-Book bereit und erklärt Anwendungsfälle von einfachen PCs bis hin zu komplexen Systemen aus vielen Maschinen.