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Long Term Course Retention Policy
The Faculty LITS Advisory Committee considered retention of older courses on our previous LMS (Moodle) in March 2015. It was recognized that many courses are taught cyclically and having one or two prior iterations of the course to refer back to is valuable for faculty. At the same time, learning management systems, like Moodle and Canvas, are not built to be storage vehicles. Necessary upgrades and changes to the system mean that carrying materials over indefinitely creates a technological and administrative debt that saps resources better used on current support and enhancements.
To balance those needs, LITS has settled on a course retention policy of 3 academic years plus the current year, with courses older than 6 semesters to be deleted in the summer (early August). In August 2022, we deleted courses from AY2019.
Saving Older Material
If there are materials from earlier course sites that you wish to save, there are two quick and easy options - or you can do both:
Create a course backup file and save it to Google Drive or other storage. This file will later need to be restored within Canvas before you can pull out individual items, but it maintains the organization of the files more exactly.
Download all instructor files and save the resulting folder full of files to your Google Drive or elsewhere. This allows you to pick-and-choose to re-use individual files, but does not maintain the course structure.
If you have organized your course with all weeks or topics visible on a single page, we also suggest you print or save that page, as a quick visual record of your organization of the course.
Access to Past Courses
Student Access:
In order to comply with copyright law, LITS removes student access to Canvas course sites a few weeks after the completed term's grades are due. Students are welcome to download copies of any materials they would like to keep before that date. Instructors will still be able to access all of their course sites, but some student data will be hidden. Instructors, please let us know if you would like help downloading copies of student data.
Student Extensions:
Faculty should contact the Educational Technology team for assistance if they have a student who has an extension and requires continued access to complete coursework, or if they are teaching a multi-term course, where students will continue to need access to the previous term's materials. Email us at edtech@mtholyoke.edu.
Faculty Access:
Course sites are retained on Canvas for 3 prior years plus the current academic year, as per the Long Term Course Retention Policy above. They can be found Canvas's "Past Enrollments" section.