Archiving Discussion Board Threads

Question

Greetings,

I have a few users on campus that have a single course shell that they use on a rotating basis.  An example would be a student orientation course.  Is there a way to Archive the discussion responses and threads, so that the prompt can be reused and the student responses cleared?  I though about copying a discussion Forum and hiding the older version from the users, but is there a cleaner option?

Thank you,

Karl

Karl.C.186 · Answer

Thank you for the response, Gideon.

That was my initial thought and suggestion, but was not sure if there was another option.  Essentially, it is an orientation course, so students flow in as they enroll so the instructor was not 100% sure they wanted to create a new shell and they wanted to scan data to look for nuggets of knowledge that may help them improve the student support experience.  For the time being, we created copies of the Discussion Forums renamed them and hid the older versions from student view.  It will work for the short-term, until the list becomes too large unwieldy…then the new shell. :)

Gideon.S.714 · Answer

The cleanest and easiest way to both archive and clear student responses to the discussion is to create a new course shell and copy the content/assessments from the previous offering each time.

I'd like to hear more about the reason for using a single course shell.  I'm curious.  There are a few ways this could be done, but probably the best way is to create a master course shell that houses the discussion forum/topic.  This way you can delete it with each offering (the response data will remain in the discussions data sets) and re-import it into the course from the master course shell.