At the end of each semester there are some things that on-line faculty should do as soon as final grades are turned in. This includes archiving your grade book and then deleting all students who no longer require access to the course. These procedures should be completed AT THE END OF THE SEMESTER BY EVERYONE WHO IS A DESIGNER OF A WEBCT COURSE.

Backing Up Your Grade Book: Since resetting the student database deletes your roster and your student records, you should download your grade book. You can subsequently open the downloaded grade book file in Excel. To download your grade book:

• Log in to your WebCT course
• Select Manage Course from the Designer Menu
• Click the Manage Students on the Manage Course window
• Click the Download button
• Select from the drop-down menu, the type of Record Separator you want to use.
• Click the Download Button
• Save the downloaded text file to your hard drive. You may want to rename it to some more user friendly name. It will be downloaded as a .txt file
• The text file can be opened in Excel.

Archiving E-mail Messages: Resetting E-mail deletes all e-mail and the numbering of course e-mail will be reset to 1. If you want to preserve some of the e-mails or attachments, you have to go into your e-mail and save the e-mail or attachments. An easy way of archiving e-mail messages is to select all of the messages you want to archive, compile them and save the compiled file. If you have questions on how to do that, please contact the Learning Support Specialist on your campus.

Archiving Discussion Board Messages: Resetting the Discussion board deletes all posted messages and attachments and sets the numbering for the discussion board back to 1. You might want to archive some of the discussion board posts. One way to archive the messages, is to:

• Go into the Discussion board
• Select ALL topics if you want to archive messages in all of the topics or select the topic you want to archive.
• In View mode, select SHOW ALL messages.
• Choose SELECT ALL if you want to archive all of the messages in the topic, or SELECT INDIVIDUAL messages you want to archive.
• Select COMPILE and GO.
• Click DOWNLOAD and SAVE to save the compiled file to your hard drive. Before saving the file, rename it to some user-friendly name.

  NOTE: (If you find yourself archiving a lot of assignments that were posted to the discussion board, you might consider making those posted assignments a permanent part of your course content. That would avoid the need to archive.

Resetting the Calendar: Resetting the Calendar will remove all calendar items. You might NOT want to reset the calendar. It takes a lot of time to enter calendar items. Instead, you might consider moving calendar entries to corresponding dates in the upcoming semester. You do want to delete calendar entries that you do not move to the new semester since they will appear as calendar entries when you students log in to your course for the first time. There is an alternative to deleting calendar entries; and that is to hide them by changing the access level of the calendar item from Public to Private. For the Spring '03 semester, we strongly recommend that you download the calendar, edit it on your local system and upload it into your course that was moved to the new 3.8 server. To do that:

• Go to your course calendar.
• Select DESIGNER OPTIONS..
• Under OPTIONS, select COMPILE OR DOWNLOAD CALENDAR ENTIRES and GO.
• Select the range of dates and any filter you want to use.
• Click DOWNLOAD and save the file, renaming the file to some user-friendly name.
• You can then edit the file locally and upload into your course.

Archiving Chat Logs: Resetting chat will delete the contents of the chat folder. If you want to archive any chat logs in the chat folder, you should copy the logs to another folder before resetting the chat. However, if you have any links in your course to chat logs in the chat folder, those links will be broken when you rename the folder and you will have to recreate those them. Another option is to rename the chat folder from "chat" to something else, since resetting the chat deletes the folder "chat" folder. Renaming the chat folder will also result in broken links to any of your chat log files. The third option is not to reset the chat tool.

Backing up your entire course: Backing up your course will back up all course material for a given semester. There are advantages and disadvantages to doing this. That advantage is that backing up your course using the WebCT back up tool will archive everything. However, there are also disadvantages. First, it will archive everything, student records AND course content. Thus the backup file might be very large, especially if you have a publisher's course with a lot of multimedia. Another disadvantage of relying on a backup file is that it will not be available locally. To access the material in the backup file, it must first be uploaded into a new WebCT course and restored. That is why we recommend that you back-up individual course components and download them to your local system for easy access.

To backup your course using the WebCT back up tool:

• Log in to your WebCT course
• Select Manage Course from the Designer Menu
• Select Create Backup located in the Course Functions Section of the page
• From the drop-down menu under Backup Course, select Create backup and Go
• On the Create Backup page, enter a brief description including the semester for the backup.
• Click Create. It might take a while to create a backup for a large course. Be patient and do not interrupt the process.
• After successfully completing the backup, click Continue.
• Select the radio button of the newly created backup file
• From the drop-down menu under Backup File Functions, select Download
• Download the zip file to your local system.
• Delete the zip file from your WebCT course.

Resetting your course database IF YOU HAVE NO INCOMPLETES:

This procedure will delete all students and all records from your course. If you have any incompletes or student you want to retain in your course database, you should follow the instructions below.)

• Log in to your WebCT course.
• Select Manage Course from the Designer Menu.
• Select Reset Course from the Manage Course page.
• Place a check mark in the Reset box on the Course Reset page.
• Click the Reset button.
• Wait patiently until the course has been reset. DO NOT INTERRUPT THE PROCESS.

Resetting your course database IF YOU HAVE INCOMPLETES OR STUDENTS YOU WANT TO RETAIN IN YOUR COURSE DATABASE.

This procedure will allow you to manually delete students from your class database, retaining those students taking an incomplete. It will preserve their record and allow them access to your course. To delete a selected group of students from your course database:

• Click on Manage Course from the Control Panel of your Course
• Click on Manage Students
• From the Manage Students drop-down menu, select Select STUDENTS TO VIEW and GO.
• Your class roster will appear with all of the students selected. DESELECT the names of those students with incompletes and click VIEW.
• WebCT will display the students that you have selected to delete from your course. Please note that deleting students from your course will delete all of their records.
• From the Manage Students drop-down menu, select DELETE SHOWN RECORDS and GO.
• A Confirm Deletion screen will appear. Confirm that you want to delete those student records that are shown. Click DELETE.
• Be patient and wait until the process is completed. This might take a while for large courses. DO NOT INTERRUPT THE PROCESS!
• After the process is completed, to display the roster of students that you did not delete, select from the Manage Students drop-down menu, SHOW ALL STUDENTS and GO. The student records for those students you chose not to delete will be displayed.