D2L Talk: Archiving

I’ve written here before about doing some D2L Spring cleaning and about the changes to your course displays if you’re enrolled in too many courses. But – get excited! – our system admins are going to be addressing both of those issues for us.

Last week, you should have received an email explaining these changes.

Here are the highlights:

• On June 30, “Bb Import” courses will be removed from D2L.
• Archiving of courses will start on June 11 and will be completed by June 22.
• All courses that are a year old will be moved to the “Archive” area and will be made inactive.

The most important thing you need to do is to make sure you have everything out of the “Bb Imports” courses that you need. Since we’ve had D2L for just shy of two years now, you’ve likely taught any courses that were still lingering in “Bb Imports,” which means you’ve copied material from those courses into live D2L courses.

If you do have some lingering courses there whose material you want to save, you need to export that material. This video will show you how. Be sure that you re-title the zipped file with all of your course material so that it matches the title of the course you exported.

Next, you need to be mindful of what will happen to your year-old courses at the start of each new quarter. As the email explained, when the Autumn 2012-13 courses are loaded, the Autumn 2011-12 courses will be moved to Archive and deactivated. Students won’t see them anymore, so you may get some requests from students who didn’t get some materials out of the course in time. If that happens, you can either make the archived course active again or go into the course yourself, retrieve what the student asked for (like a reading or a graded copy of a paper) and email it to them.

This is good news for you. It’ll help clean up some of the clutter on your “My Courses” widget, and it’ll automate some of the tidying you might have already been doing.