New Academic Year Process
Each academic year new versions of courses are created for the new cohorts of students. This section will provide you with useful information about this process and how you can manage your courses after rollover.
Annual renewal of courses
Looking for Help with Learn?
From the beginning of the 23/24 academic year, all new courses will be delivered using an updated Learn interface. In order to ensure that users can access support materials for current and previous year courses we have kept old support materials on Edweb pages and created a new Sharepoint Learn site full of useful resources for the new interface.
For Learn resources for current courses, please visit the Learn Sharepoint (University of Edinburgh users only).
Here you can access the most up-to-date information such as:
- Good practice guidance
- Training and support resources
- How to guides
To access support material for older courses please use the pages below as usual.
Renewal of courses is to ensure that for each instance of a course users have access to a new 'clean' course that does not contain previous student submissions or interactions but does contain the required content.
For most courses, the simplest way to renew a course is a copy of the old course into the new one, and then refresh it by deleting old items and adding in new ones. We strongly recommend that you then tidy your course by deleting all older and unused content and tools.
Staff can also copy individual folders and files.See the Copy & Backups page for detailed instructions.
Course Rollover
The annual renewal of courses is now referred to as "New Academic Year Process" or NAYP.
Staff access to courses
Courses fed from EUCLID will have access for the Course Organiser and Course Secretary (as fed from EUCLID). All other staff will have to be added.
Course availability for students
In late July we will start the student enrolment data feed from EUCLID, which will allow students enrolled on next years’ courses to have access to them.
If you don't want students to access the course please make the course unavailable via Customisation > Properties > Make Course Available
If your course is from EUCLID
Make your course Learn Enabled by selecting “Yes” in the course instance page in EUCLID. This will create a new Learn course for the coming year, available the next day. You can then copy your current Learn course into the new course, and make any updates that are required. If you have copied your whole course, note that you will have duplicate left-hand menu entries for items also created in the default template. You will need to delete any you don’t need.
If your course is manually created in Learn
If you have a manually-created course you wish to roll forward, (e.g. a shared course) you can use the Shared Course request form to ask that a new instance is created. You can request the shared (“target”) course and can roll forward any content to this in the usual way if required, then start updating content at any time.
Please give the exact course title for your shared course.
Requests to share enrolment feeds are also dealt with via the shared course request form, and will go “live” when the student data feed goes live.
Course copy options can help you manage which files and folders you copy over. If you have a course which contains a lot of very large files (many high-quality images for example) you may find that copying is very slow. If so, we suggest that you copy items across from your old course in parts, rather than as a whole course. Alternatively, you may wish to start the copy process last thing in the working day, when activity is less.
You can see how large your course is likely to be when you choose the “Export” option: there is a “calculate size” tool. A course would be considered large if it is 500Mb or more. You can see the size of individual folders of content from the content collection.
If you still have difficulties, contact the IS Helpline.
See the information on Copying and Backup for detailed information and instructions on copying options.
Retaining content
Staff should note that none of the University’s VLE systems are suitable for long-term storage, or intended to be used as archives. Storage and access to summative assessment grades and materials for any period other than the current Academic Year should be managed in accordance with the policies of your school, college and the University, outside the VLE environments.
Schools are responsible for selecting and retaining a sample of assessed coursework for Teaching Programme Review (TPR) purposes.
Schools and subject areas are responsible for ensuring that:
- Assessed coursework is retained for 4 months after the relevant Board of Examiners meeting and then destroyed.
- Annotated non-assessed coursework is retained for 6 months after marking and then either returned to the student or destroyed.