Kenyon stores only the current year’s Moodle pages at moodle.kenyon.edu. Each summer, a fresh Moodle server is installed at moodle.kenyon.edu, and the upcoming fall semester courses are loaded onto it. The previous year’s Moodle server is renamed moodlearchive.kenyon.edu/yyyy-yy/. This practice began in July 2011.
Having separate Moodle servers for current and past semesters makes it easier for students and faculty to navigate their current courses. From fall 2006 to spring 2011, we kept all 6,000 courses on the same server. Toward the end of that period we were receiving frequent complaints from students and faculty who were having trouble finding their current courses.
The separated structure also provides us with some technical benefits. Moodle upgrades are not always compatible with older Moodle modules; using separate servers allows us to maintain the records of older courses without the risk that they will be lost in an upgrade. Starting every year with a clean install delivers small performance improvements and makes it easier for us to troubleshoot any problems.
However, we cannot keep these archived servers running forever. Moodle has announced a formal calendar for the end of support for each Moodle release; after this point old versions of Moodle do not receive the patches which are necessary to keep them running.
Kenyon will delete each archive server in the fall semester 3 years after its move to archive status. Faculty members will, therefore, have access to all of a student’s work on Moodle during a normal 4-year enrollment. A faculty member should not lose their most current iteration of the Moodle page for a regular course; almost all repeating courses at Kenyon are taught every other year or more often. We have found that the 2006-11 Moodlearchive is consulted much less frequently than the newer archives, which corroborates this data.
Faculty members may still wish to maintain their own archives of older version of courses, or the student work held therein. CIP staff will work with you to find a useful storage solution. Please feel free to contact Joe Murphy with any questions.