Course Archival
From ElateWiki
Digital course archival is a fairly common practice in various online learning programs. Sometimes, this is done as a way to more easily transfer digital learning objects (LOs) from one course version to another. For others, it's about correct record-keeping in the face of student queries. (How much an institution of higher education keeps is part of its overall risk management and legal strategy and culture.)
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[edit] What gets Archived?
In a course archival, the digital contents (audio, video, slideshows, text files, images, and screen captures) are usually captured. The more nuanced programs will also capture the course structure, the text in the message boards, integrated emails, and even some text annotations of the course materials. Course announcements may be captured albeit with their former time stamps for display. Student and staff records of interactions may also be captured.
If desired, all student uploads and messages may also be captured and archived.
[edit] Reconstituting an Online Course
The act of reconstituting an online course usually requires the particular learning / course management system (L/CMS) in which that course was created.
Also, most systems require some cost to reconstitute a course and have it uploaded on the server.
[edit] Transferring Courses between L/CMSes
Some programmers have built the technological structures needed to move or "migrate" digital course contents between different L/CMS systems. In this situation, usually, people will download the course in zipped format from one L/CMS and upload that zipped file straight to the other. There is usually work in re-deploying that transferred course, but that usually does not take a lot of time or effort. Sometimes, some extraneous code ends up in the new course and may have to be cleaned out.
Moving courses within a system may be as simple as pointing to the former course from the new course shell... After that, the only work may involve updating files and ensuring the proper start and end dates for that new course.