Purpose of Policy

To define the length of time courses contained in the College's Learning Management System (LMS) will be retained and define the responsibility of course data ownership.

Guiding Principles

• To retain course sites and content for a period of time which instructors and students find adequate, useful and abide by program retention laws.
• To optimize the performance of the LMS experience.
• To ensure that the storage and backup space is used efficiently and to minimize the financial and technical impact of constantly increasing disk storage.
• Retaining copies of the syllabus, electronic grade book and electronic student work is the sole responsibility of the instructor.

Scope of Policy

This policy covers courses contained in the Learning Management System (currently Moodle) managed and maintained by the Information Technology Department (IT).

Statement of Policy

IT will retain LMS courses for Seven (7) years from the end of the course. At the end of seven years, the course will be deleted. IT will process removal of course sites more than seven years old each summer.

Instructors may request that a course be exempt from deletion; with proper approval from the Dean or Chief Academic Officer, however a course will not remain within the LMS for more than ten (10) years. Instructors may request that a course or courses be deleted sooner than seven (7) years from the end of the semester.

Deleting a course from the LMS permanently removes it from the system. When a course is deleted it is removed from the instructor and user's course list. All materials stored in the course are deleted. This includes but is not limited to files, grades, assignments, quizzes, surveys, links and any other data contained within the course that is stored in the LMS database and file system.

It is recommended that instructors archive their courses at least twice a semester, after midterm grades have been submitted and when final grades are due. The Information Technology department will send out reminders before removing courses from the system so that instructors have an adequate reminder to archive material. Instructors should always download student work and/or make copies of the grade book prior to removal of material from the course.

Instructions on how to archive a course are provided at the Distance Learning website http://www.gcc.mass.edu/distance-ed/ under information about the current Learning Management
System - Moodle.

Review of Policy

This policy shall be reviewed by Information Technology, the Information Resource Management Committee, and other appropriate departments as deemed necessary by the Chief Information Officer. This review will occur at least annually and at other times as needed, and faculty shall be notified of any resultant changes.

creation: February 2014 – M.A.
revised: March 2014 – M.A.;M.B.;D.W.
revised: March 2014 - IRM