Moodle Autumn Clean

It’s almost the start of a new term. Your Moodle sites have been rolled over, and it’s now the perfect time to have an Autumn (Spring) clean!

It’s easy to use Moodle as a repository for your files, but over the years this can lead to a lot of content that is either out of date or no longer used.

Before your site is released to students, it’s worth going through and looking at what’s there and having a good think about whether you really need it. If not, delete it!

Getting rid of old content is a good way of improving your accessibility score. More files on a site, means that Ally will pick up more accessibility issues.

More information on Ally and general accessibility can be found on our previous blog posts:

• Ally: Digital Accessibility in Moodle
• Make accessibility a habit: Power Point
• Make accessibility a habit: Word Documents
• Make Accessibility a Habit: PDF Files

Also check your links to external sites, like YouTube, and make sure they still work. If not, is there an alternative that you can replace it with?

Deleting content

Deleting content is easy. When in edit mode, click on the three dots to the right of the content you want to delete, and then click on the delete option.

Deleting a section

Deleting a section removes it from the site, including any activities that are stored within it.

The process for deleting is the same for an individual piece of content. Click on the three dots, then select delete section.

Restoring content

If you’ve deleted something you actually need, no need to panic. Moodle stores deleted activities for 21 days. You can restore this content by doing the following:

1. Click on the open course menu link at the top of the page.

2. Click on more, then click on the Recycle bin link.

3. Locate the item you want to restore, and click on the restore button.

This will then return the activity to either same section it was deleted from, or if that no longer exists, to the bottom of the first section.

Things to note

• You cannot restore a deleted section, although you can restore the activities that were contained within it.
• The recycle bin cannot be used to restore edited text from an activity. Once you’ve updated and saved a piece of text, the previous version is gone (although you can potentially still access it on the unit from the previous year).
• You cannot retrieve individual pages/chapters that have been deleted from a book from the recycle bin. It’s only the book itself that could be restored if deleted.