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How To Guide
Download this HowTo guide (PDF) or edit the edit the Word versionWord version to customise it for your department. It includes a link to a short video guide.
You generally have a window of time in which to reset your course starting immediately AFTER the yearly Moodle snapshot, and ending sometime before teaching is due to start for the new academic year.
During the upgrade and archiving process that takes place each year, all Portico enrolment mappings are switched off, or 'deactivated'. If you want to reactivate the mappings for the new cohort, you must wait until after the current year's module registrations have been cleared out of Portico (usually August 1st.) before you reactive your portico mappings.
When | What | What this means for course owners |
---|---|---|
Sometime between May - July | All teaching and student activity on the Moodle course finishes. | If teaching will continue on your course past late July, for example, you have late submissions, then your course should follow the non-standard reset instructions |
Late July | Moodle is taken down for maintenance A snapshot copy of Moodle is taken All portico enrolment mappings are de-activated | Window of opportunity for course resets now opens. Course owners should reset their courses and prepare them for the next year's teaching. See start of term checklist |
1st August | Year-end rolls over in Portico/SITS. Old module registrations are removed. | Course owners can now reactivate their portico enrolment mappings. |
Sometime between late August and September | Student activity starts on Moodle courses. | The window of opportunity for course resets closes. Courses need to be reset before teaching starts on Moodle courses. |
The Digital Education team strongly advise that you do NOT reset your course before the snapshot date as you'll lose all of this year's student activity before the snapshot copy is taken.
Warning: If you are a tutor on the course DO NOT reset the Tutor role or you will unenrol yourself!! You can unenrol different user roles by selecting them from the Unenrol users list. Hold down the *Ctrl *key on your keyboard to select multiple user roles.
Note: Most people will just use the Select default option and won't need to worry about these settings
If you want to remove something in particular, tick the appropriate settings to remove the information you no longer need, as described below:
The General reset options allow you to:
The Roles reset options allow you to Unenrol all users with a particular role within a course (e.g students), as well as remove all role overrides and role assignments specific to the course. Overrides allow Moodle Administrators to change the permissions for a particular activity to allow/restrict users' actions for that activity only. For example, users with the role Student in your course can usually start new discussions in forums. If there is one particular forum for which you want to restrict that capability, then you can set an override that PREVENTS the capability for Students to "Start new discussions". Role assignments allow Course Administrators and tutors to assign a user to a different role for a particular activity. For example, you might make an exemplary student a tutor on a forum, so that they have the permissions needed to be able to moderate the forum (e.g. edit, delete and move forum postings). These settings do not affect user role assignments outside the context of the course. If you are a tutor or course administrator on the course, DO NOT reset that role or you will unenrol yourself!! You can Unenrol users by selecting the user's role you wish to unenrol. Use the [Shift] and [Ctrl] keys on your keyboard to select multiple user roles.
The Gradebook reset options allow you to delete all gradebook items and categories and/or delete all recorded grades within the course. Note that these grades are still recorded against a user's account.
The Group reset options provides you with the ability to delete all groups created in the course and/or remove users from groups previously created within the course. You can also delete all groupings created in the course and/or remove all users from any groupings within the course.
Prior to resetting your course, if you have given yourself a student role on the course, ensure you remove this, or you risk unenrolling yourself during the reset. To do this, go to the course, Settings > User and ensure you can only see 'course administrator' or 'tutor' by your name
Once your undergraduate course has been reset, you can then enable Portico enrolments in preparation for the next academic year- please click here for instructions. The rollover period for Portico enrolments is 1st August.
If you use reading list items embedded in the Moodle course in the central column (as opposed to the Reading List block), you will also need to edit its settings and reselect the reading list items to ensure they point to the new reading list and not the old, archived version and any new readings appear.
Contact Digital Education if you have any questions or require advice.