Purge Courses Manually

This article will be most useful for Concourse Admins.

Overview

An important part of Concourse maintenance is ensuring that the courses in your system are accurately maintained. This means keeping track of courses that were created erroneously or are no longer in use so they can be deleted from your system or archived. For example, if a new domain user in your system attempts to create a linked template but does so incorrectly, the course must be deleted (purged) and recreated correctly to receive content from high-level templates.

It is possible to start the purge process for many courses simultaneously with a Mark Courses for Deletion Feed, but after the feed has been run, courses must still be purged manually. In this article, we explain the process of manually marking courses for deletion and then purging those extraneous courses from your system. 

Before You Begin

There is no limit to the number of courses that can be created and stored in your Concourse system, so purging extraneous courses is a matter of importance for accurate reporting and record-keeping, not for system data use. Your institution should determine the appropriate criteria and cadence for deleting courses from your system.

Removing courses from your system is an irreversible, two-step process. Once courses are purged, the courses themselves, syllabus content, course files, and associated user data cannot be recovered. Courses should only be purged if the System Administrator is absolutely certain that the course should no longer exist within the system. To start the purge process, courses must be marked for deletion; only System Administrators and Domain Administrators are able to mark courses for deletion. Next, courses that have been marked for deletion must be manually purged from the system; only System Administrators are able to purge courses. You can rest assured that only highly trained administrators that you have designated are able to remove courses and their associated data from your system.

If your institution determines that a user should be able to purge courses but they do not have Administer System permissions, their account will need to be updated before they can follow the steps below. For more information about updating this permission, see System Permissions in Concourse.

Marking Courses for Deletion

To start the process of removing a course from your system, it must first be marked for deletion. Marking courses for deletion manually is a process that is performed one course at a time. Begin by searching for the course to be removed. We recommend that you follow Best Practices for Search to find results most efficiently. Once you have located and accessed the course to be marked for deletion and purged:

1. In the Syllabus Navigation Menu, select Settings > Course.
2. In the Optional Information block on the right side of the screen, select the Mark for Deletion link (see image below).
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. If the course was marked for deletion accidentally, select the option to Unmark for Deletion.
   

The course that has been marked for deletion now appears in the list of courses in your system that are ready to be purged.

Purging Courses

A course may not be purged from the system until it has been marked for deletion. This two-step process serves as a safety net to make it more difficult to accidentally purge courses from a Concourse system. Once a course has been marked for deletion, it may be purged from the Concourse system by following the steps below:

1. In the main navigation, select the Admin dropdown and then Tools.
2. On the Tools page, under the Purge heading (last option on the page), select courses. The following page displays all courses that have been marked for deletion. 
3. Courses may be purged individually by selecting Purge to the right of the specified course’s External ID (if present).
4. All courses in this list may be purged by selecting Purge All in the upper-right corner of the Purge Courses table.
   
   
   
   
   
5. After selecting the option to purge courses individually or en masse, a warning appears. The warning reminds the Concourse Admin that when a course is purged, all course information is irrevocably deleted. If the course is (courses are) definitely to be purged, select OK.

Best Practices and Recommendations

Because of the data loss that occurs when courses are purged from Concourse systems, it is recommended that courses be purged only if it is NOT necessary to maintain course records for any reason. If it is determined that a course should be purged, we recommend downloading the syllabus (or bulk downloading syllabi) as a PDF just in case syllabus content may be needed at some point in the future. 

If a course should be retained in your system but made unavailable to users, the course can be hidden from search or the course’s group permissions can be set to None so that users cannot view syllabus content, files, or the user list. 

We recommend that you attempt the course purge process in your sandbox prior to performing the process in your production environment just to ensure that you are comfortable with the process and don’t delete any courses that should not be removed from your system. If you need your sandbox data refreshed or if you need assistance accessing your sandbox, email support@campusconcourse.com for assistance.

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