End of Year Academic Archiving
by Jennifer Spohrer - As the academic year draws to a close, we would like to remind faculty and students to archive any academic course files that they anticipate needing in the future.
- Students: We recommend saving final drafts of course assignments (papers, presentation slides, project materials, etc.) and copies of your course syllabi at the end of each semester. You may need these for portfolios, applications, or to demonstrate course content in future employment or graduate school applications. LITS cannot guarantee that you will have access to Moodle course sites beyond the end of a course and you will lose access to Moodle itself when you graduate or leave the college. (Graduating? Make sure you archive files in other campus systems like email, OneDrive, or Domain of One's Own, too!)
- Faculty: LITS is committed to retaining academic Moodle courses on the server for two years, but Moodle was not designed for long-term file storage. If you teach a course infrequently, please make a backup of it and save it outside of Moodle. If you use the same documents (e.g., readings) in multiple courses, it may be easier to find and manage them if you store archival copies in a folder on your computer, a network drive or OneDrive or using a bibliographic tool such as Zotero.
See our Moodle Policies for details about access and file and data retention. If you have questions or need help saving and organizing archived course materials, please email help@brynmawr.edu.