Life cycle of the Moodle area

Belongs to themes:

By selecting a degree programme you are able to see the general content as well as the possible degree programme-specific content.

At the end of the course, students will have access to the Moodle area for as long as the course is open (Settings - Course visibility: Show). It is important to send a clear message to students about the time they need to retrieve their own work from the Moodle area. After this, it is advisable to turn off the visibility of the Moodle area for students so that the course does not appear in vain on the students' course lists (Settings - Course visibility: Hide). 

Moodle is not meant to be a repository site for the course's performance data. The performance data must be archived in accordance with the rules of the university and faculty. Read more about data protection: Use of Moodle in teaching and Time periods and conditions for announcing and retaining study-related documents.

A Moodle area with no active activity ends up in the deletion process. Before the course leaves Moodle, the teacher receives warning messages to e-mail. If you want to remove the course area from the server before this, you can do so by sending a request to Moodle support at moodle@helsinki.fi. If the Moodle area includes many teachers, please agree with the teacher responsible for the course on the need to maintain the course area.

When the course is re-educated, a new, empty Moodle area should be ordered for the course. Using Moodle's Import function, you can easily get resources and activities from the old course for a new Moodle area.

If necessary, you can import your Moodle area as a file, see Course backup.

Deleting unused Moodle areas
Clear the Moodle area of students

Deleting unused Moodle areas

The recommendation is to create a new Moodle area for each course implementation separately, i.e. for example for ICT driving license courses autumn 2023 and 2024. However, this will result in a lot of outdated Moodle areas for past courses, which may make it difficult for students to find the right course area. It therefore makes sense to regularly and centrally hide and remove obsolete, unused Moodle areas. In this case, the teacher’s list of courses will also become clearer.

The Moodle areas that have not had visits for 12 months AND have a start date older than 12 months end up in the automatic removal process. They are not deleted automatically, but instead users with teacher privileges on the course area receive email notification on the situation. Teachers will receive three notifications before the Moodle area is deleted. The stages are as follows:

  • Stage 1: If the Moodle area is still open for students, it will be closed, i.e. students cannot use the course area anymore. Teachers can still access the course area via My courses page.
  • Stage 2: The Moodle area will be moved to the hidden category and will also be hidden from the teachers' My courses page. However, teachers will still be able to access the course area at its direct address.
  • Stage 3: The Moodle area is deleted.

Teachers receive an email notification two months before each stage. If the course area is still in educational use, the deleting process can be postponed in Stage 1 by editing the course start date via Moodle area's settings. Note that the start date cannot be in future if students should be able to access the Moodle area. After Stage 2 you can stop the deleting process by asking for the reinstatement from moodle@helsinki.fi.

Clear the Moodle area of students

Please note the student's data protection: Once the course has been evaluated, it is recommended to remove students and other information from the Moodle area, which is no longer necessary to maintain. Exam performances and seminar work are kept for six months according to the archiving plan. After this, the teacher must, in principle, dispose of the performance data. Personal data should not be stored longer than is necessary for their purpose.

Read more: Data protection for teachers