This is advance notice to D2L campus site admins and D2L campus
trainers that D2L semester-based courses that are more than 2 years old
will be purged mid-December 2008.
There may be some faculty who want to retain old course materials, so
we wanted you to know the plan in advance so you can respond to their
questions and provide assistance to those who want to copy or export
courses.
IMS ADVISORY COUNCIL RECOMMENDS TWO-YEAR RETENTION OF ONLINE COURSES
The IMS Advisory Council recommended two-year retention of online
courses and approved a purge of any courses over two years old at the
end of fall semester 2008. This purge is a PRO-ACTIVE measure to
facilitate a smooth spring 2009 start up. Future purges will be a
maintenance measure to ensure continuous high performance from semester
to semester. (See details under FILE SERVERS GETTING FULL below).
TIMELINE FOR INITIAL PURGE
The purge will begin mid-December 2008. The first purge will be
conservative, and will remove all YRTR-related* courses including Spring
2006 and all previous semester courses. Courses from Fall 2008 to
Summer 2006 will be retained.
*Courses that are not associated with a YRTR semester will not be
purged (development courses, for example, will not be purged).
TO BE PURGED MID-DECEMBER 2008:
Spring 2006, Fall 2005, Summer 2005, Spring 2005, Fall 2004, Summer
2004, Spring 2004 courses
Future purges will be performed each semester, and will purge any YRTR
course more than two years old.
FACULTY NOTIFICATION
Emails will be sent to faculty who have one or more courses in D2L,
using the email address that is associated with their D2L account.
Email notification will also be sent to campus CIOs, CAOs, campus site
administrators and campus trainers.
Each campus will be responsible for notifying any faculty who are not
currently teaching: past adjuncts, faculty on sabbaticals or other
leaves, etc.
EXPORTING COURSE MATERIALS FROM OLD COURSES
There may be some faculty who wish to retain course materials from
these older courses. D2L Campus Site Admins and D2L Campus Trainers can
assist faculty who wish to export gradebooks, course files or other
course components. See the attached list of which items can be exported
to a zip file that can be imported back into D2L, and which items can be
copied from an existing course shell to a new course shell.
Refer faculty to the D2L Community Site at
https://community.desire2learn.com and the documentation titled
“Editing Course Tools and Properties v8.3.0” which includes
instructions and special considerations for copying components and
exporting course materials.
NOTE: Student data such as discussion posts and quiz attempts cannot
be exported or copied.
FILE SERVERS GETTING FULL
The course materials and course data stored on our self-hosted D2L file
server and database have been growing in size since we began using D2L
five years ago. The file server stores the instructors’ course files
and the files that students upload to the dropbox. The disk space
needed to store and back up these files grows with each semester. The
staff time required to perform the backups also increases. The database
that records and stores data such as quiz attempts is also growing
excessively, resulting in potential performance issues and on-going
maintenance issues as re-indexing the database requires lengthy periods
of time. With each semester, more and more students and faculty use
D2L. The problems resulting from continuing to retain all this old
data:
- Purchasing additional storage space is cost prohibitive (approximately
- $1 million).
- Excessive staff time is required to perform backups and maintenance.
- Additional downtime is required to perform database re-indexing.
- Performance degradation will be an issue if old data is not purged.
STAY TUNED
Stay tuned for official notification that will be sent to faculty,
CIOs, CAOs, site admins, and trainers within the next few days.
