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Moodle Policy

Policy Statement
Moodle is Beloit College's supported Course Management System (CMS). Moodle resources are available to all Beloit College faculty, students and staff to be used for College-related purposes.

Reason For Policy
 The Moodle Policy defines requirements and practices related to Moodle accounts, courses, and data.

Who Should Know This Policy
This policy affects all users of Moodle and Moodle Groups. This includes Students, Faculty, and Staff at Beloit College.

Contacts
Questions about this policy can be directed to the Moodle Administrator at moodle@beloit.edu.

Accounts
Who can have an account?
Moodle and Moodle Groups accounts are available for all faculty, students and staff at Beloit College.  If individuals who don't have a beloit.edu account need access to Moodle courses, either Guest access can be granted to the course or the Moodle Administrator can manually create a user account with the approval of the Director of Information Technology.  Faculty and staff accounts will be confirmed by the Human Resources office and student accounts will be confirmed by the Registrar.

What is the account format?
 To ensure a secure and consistent environment, Moodle usernames and passwords will be the same as the College network username and password.

Termination of accounts
IT will terminate accounts as directed by Human Resources (for faculty/staff) and the Registrar (for students).  If a course facilitator's account is terminated, IT will contact the necessary department to find out who the new assigned facilitator should be. Termination of an account also removes associated course user data.

Courses
Who can request a course?
 Any student, faculty, or staff member at Beloit College can request a course if it is related to official college business.  This includes Clubs, Committees, Groups, etc.  Courses will not be created for non-Beloit College users.

How are courses created?
 The Moodle Administrator will process course requests as received.  Courses will generally be set up within 24 hours of the request.

Faculty who need a Moodle course(s) to be ready by the first day of class, should make their requests a minimum of one week prior to the beginning of the term. Any course requests submitted after this time will be completed as quickly as possible but may not be ready for the first day of classes.

How are courses named?

  • Academic courses are suffixed with the semester in which they are taught, if applicable
  • Academic courses are named with this format: Number Name Semester (ENGL 301 Medieval Literature FA 10)
  • The course name for an academic course is matched to the College's course catalog
  • Course in Moodle Groups will be named as needed based upon the request.

How are academic courses archived/deleted?
 Academic courses are moved to a Moodle Archive section at the end of each semester. The courses will remain active until:

  • January 31 for Fall courses
  • May 31 for Spring courses
  • August 31 for Summer courses

On each of these dates the course will be deactivated and stored for two academic years. After two years the courses will be deleted from the server.

How are administrative courses in Moodle Groups archived/deleted?
Administrative courses will be archived on an “as needed” basis. The Moodle Administrator will collaborate with the person(s) responsible for the course to determine an appropriate timeline. Courses may be archived and/or deleted at anytime at the request of the person(s) responsible for the course.

Course Access
Course instructors are responsible for granting guest access to their course(s) if they choose to do so. Instructions for doing so can be found in the Moodle Faculty Guide.

Instructors are also responsible for deciding what additional roles (Instructor/Facilitator, TA, Librarian) get access to their course.  Students will enroll themselves in courses.

Backup and Restore
The Moodle administrator will provide documentation to course instructors/facilitators on how to back up course data.  If data needs to be restored, the Moodle Administrator will be responsible for completing the restoration.

Data
Each user is responsible for their own Moodle data.  Examples of student Moodle data are uploaded assignments, forum posts, and Wiki posts.  Examples of instructor Moodle data are course readings, course quiz questions, course grades,  and links to websites.  If users wish to keep the data for more than the semester they should download the content to their computer or external storage device. 

FERPA, Copyright & Licensing
Instructors and students using Moodle should ensure that anything uploaded to Moodle does not violate FERPA or Copyright laws.  If you have questions about copyright, please see our Copyright and Filesharing page and Copyright FAQ’s.

Keeping full document copies in a course after the semester is over may violate copyright law.  Licensing restrictions for some journals require that all copies be removed from online courses at the end of the semester; therefore we strongly recommend that all full text copies be removed from courses at the end of every semester.

Upgrades and Plug-Ins
The Moodle Administrator will watch for and review new releases of Moodle and will maintain a list of requests from faculty, students and staff. Upgrades and plug-ins will initially be loaded into a test environment where they will be tested. Once an enhancement is deemed acceptable for the production environment, IT will load into the live instance of Moodle. IT will document the change in the Moodle log and will notify the appropriate constituents that the change has been made.