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How To Guide
Download this HowTo guide (PDF) or edit the Word version to customise it for your department. It includes a link to a short video guide.
How do course resets, the archive and portico enrolments affect each other?
You generally have a window of time in which to reset your course starting immediately AFTER the yearly Moodle snapshot, and ending some time 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 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.
Example timeline for a standard UG course
| When | What | What this means for course owners |
|---|---|---|
| Some time 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 you 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. |
| Some time 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.
How to reset your course
- Log in to Moodle and go to the course that you want to reset in preparation for a new cohort of students. Don’t worry, you won’t lose any resources or activities, only students, grades and contributions to forums, assignments etc.
- In the Settings block, under Course administration, click Reset.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Select default button. This will select all the usual reset options and remove any Students from your course. Leave the ticked and unticked boxes as they are.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and expand the Turnitin Assignments (V2) section > tick (if not already ticked) the ‘Use new assignment dates’ checkbox. This will ensure that the anonymous settings for the assignment stay in place. The assignment start date will be set to the date and time of the course reset, while the due and Post date will elapse seven days from then.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Reset Course button.
- All of the items you have chosen to reset will be displayed and there will be an 'OK' alongside each of these. Click 'Continue'.
- This will reset the course. It is worth checking afterwards that everything is reset properly.
**If your Turnitin submission inbox does not display the column headings, you may want to clear your web browsers cache and cookies.**
**If the course has an enrolment key set you should change it now, so that students from the previous year cannot re-enrol themselves on the course. Find out how to change the enrolment key here.**
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.
More information about the reset settings
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:
- set a new Course Start Date for the freshly reset course
- delete all Calendar events,
- delete course log report data and
- delete all user notes attached to the course.
- delete all comments
- delete all completion data
- delete all blog associations
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 roll over 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.
Need further assistance?
Contact Digital Education if you have any questions or require advice.
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