Synopsis

Instructors & students retain access to their courses for four years.

Details

California College of the Arts commits to offering access to Moodle courses for four years. Thus courses from the Spring 2024 semester, for instance, will be accessible until at least the end of the Spring 2028 semester. Users will be able to sign into a Moodle instance with a valid CCA account to view these courses. Instructors have the ability to delete or modify objects within a course, so students (and co-instructors) cannot assume that everything will look the same as when they were in the course.

Previously, CCA committed to offering access to Moodle courses for only two years and to backups of courses that appear to have been in use (see the definition for Used Course) for four years. This practice ended with the Fall 2024 semester, but courses from Summer 2020 to Fall 2021 are only available as backups. Course backups are stored as compressed archives in cloud storage. It takes time to locate a specific backup, download it, and restore it to Moodle. We attempt to restore courses within one business week of receiving a request, but cannot commit to a specific timeline.

Despite these commitments, CCA strongly recommends that users who want perpetual access to their own works create their own backups, whether on a personal hard drive or in cloud storage. As previously mentioned, while we assure access to course contents, we cannot prevent instructors from modifying them. Additionally, CCA performs software migrations—updating Moodle, its plugins, and other systems that integrate with it—and we cannot guarantee that any particular object in a course will retain all of its content or functionality perpetually into the future.

Contact the Help Desk if you would like access to a backed up Moodle course (e.g. a course older than Spring 2022 and younger than four years). Please provide the complete course section code, including semester, with your request. Section codes look like "ARTED-1000-1-2021SP" and they include a department code, course number, section number, and semester.

Not all CCA courses are in Moodle. If your course was held in Google Classroom, for instance, you would access it at https://classroom.google.com/ and it is not subject to this retention policy.