Six weeks after their end date, courses in Moodle automatically enter ‘read-only’ mode, ensuring that their contents are frozen in time. Occasionally, however, academic departments may need to make some minor changes to the courses, to enrol extra students, or to change the visibility status of a course (hiding or unhiding it).

Risks of Editing Archived Courses

Frozen courses constitute the official archive of LSE’s Moodle site. There is no additional archive or back-up that can readily be made available to students or staff. Activities that are deleted in an unfrozen course will not be retrievable - this includes submissions within assignment and quiz activities, and other student contributions.

Edits to unfrozen courses should be kept to a minimum. If you do not wish students to access something, hide it. Do not delete any contents of the course.

If you are confident that no edits are to be made that will impact the integrity of the archived course and the data contained within it, there are two options available to you:

Option 1: Contact the Digital Education Team

The simplest option for editing archived courses is to contact the Eden Centre Digital Education Team. Send an email to eden.digital@lse.ac.uk and tell us:

• Which courses need to be changed.

• Whether you just want them hidden/unhidden, or if you need them unfrozen for a certain amount of time (e.g. in order to make other edits).

• The email addresses of any students who need to be enrolled.

The Digital Education inbox is monitored throughout LSE business hours and the team can offer the best solutions for any Moodle questions.

Option 2: The ‘Archive Manager’ Role

A department with frequent needs for enrolling students or hiding/unhiding courses may prefer to have a member of their own team who can temporarily take a course out of read-only mode. The Digital Education Team can grant named users in your department the ‘Archive Manager’ role for this purpose.

How to unfreeze a course

Under the More menu, Archive Managers will see a new option called Unfreeze this context. This will take the course out of read-only mode.

• While the course is unfrozen, all Teachers (Editor) and Managers on that course will be able to make changes.

• If the course is also unhidden, enrolled students will have permission to edit submissions, add forum posts etc until the course is frozen again.

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To immediately put the course back into read-only mode:

Once the required changes have been made, you can re-freeze the course via the More menu and selecting Freeze this context. You should do this ASAP after enrolling students or unhiding a course if no other edits are needed.

To allow one day of editing:

If users need several hours of access (eg for late marking or to access the grading screen), you can leave the course unfrozen. Moodle will automatically refreeze the course at midnight.

To take a course out of read-only mode for a longer period

If a course was wrongly placed in ‘read-only’ mode when it ought to still be live, you can make it live again by changing the course end date. Courses are frozen 42 days (6 weeks) after their end date. You can use this to calculate the correct end date.

Note: When extending the lifetime of a course please consider contacting the Digital Education team so that we can make note of this for future versions.

Archive Managers must not freeze categories

‘Archive Managers’ will also notice an extra option to “Freeze this context” appears in the Manage Courses and Categories area for their category.

Please do not use this.

Courses should only be frozen and unfrozen individually. Freezing a category will affect every course within that category and block access for other managers as well as editors and students.

Image of 'Freeze this context' option that should never be used

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This option should never be used except under specific advice from the Digital Education team.