5 Reasons to Reset your Course

Many of your will have seen notices come round reminding you that courses should be reset at the end of their period of use. This is ordinarily the end of the academic year, although this could vary from course to course. If you would like to find out more about getting your Moodle site ready for the next academic year please see our advice on the UCL Moodle Resource Centre.

There are many ways resetting your Moodle course can be helpful not only to you, but also to your students and to UCL in general. The process of resetting your course, at the default level, simply involves wiping student data and setting up new Turnitin classes (should you be using Turnitin). It does not involve removing or deleting any content, other than posts or submissions made by students. Should you need to refer back to a student forum post or assignment submission this can be done via the snapshot version of Moodle available via https://moodle-archive.ucl.ac.uk/

Here are just 5 reasons why it is important to reset your course.

1. Make it easier to find new student contributions/ submissions – you won’t have to wade through previous years to find what is happening in the new academic period.

2. The page will load faster – if you keep old student data then this will have to load along with the new data, causing Moodle to take longer to load.

3. Helps to prevent confusion – if students are still enrolled on previous years course then they might be confused by any amendments for the new cohort, instead point them to the Moodle snapshot.

4. It’s the neighborly thing to do – a smaller database means that everyone can access content faster, so it helps the whole of UCL have a faster Moodle.

5. It will keep Turnitin working – we have a defined number of licensed users, and if we exceed this Turnitin stops working. Without resetting the student numbers simply keep adding up and will exceed the limit.

For guidance on how to reset your course please see the mini- guide title M26 – Resetting your Moodle course from the UCL Moodle Resource Centre wiki. If you have additional questions please contact E-Learning Environments.