We retain two academic years’ worth of courses in VIULearn from year to year. In order to minimize the amount of student data and past courses in our learning management system, the CIEL team permanently deletes courses once a year in the first week of July. This process is the VIULearn Course Cleanup.
In July 2025 we will permanently delete courses from the following semesters:
- Fall 2022
- Year 2022
- Continuous Intake 2022
- Spring 2023
- Summer (May and June) 2023
- Intersession 2023
Both course instructors and students can and are encouraged to take a backup of their work so that anything they need to retain beyond two academic years is preserved offline.
Frequently Asked Questions
Individual courses cannot be exempted from the course cleanup process. If you wish to retain a copy of a course in VIULearn for ongoing course development between offerings, we can help you set up a “Development course.” Development courses are meant to provide a space for instructors to work on course materials which can then be copied into an “official course” where it can be accessed by students. To request a manual course, please fill out a Manual Course Request Form.
For courses that run less often than every two years, we strongly suggest setting up a development course for the online materials. This course can serve as a sort of master course where materials can be stored, accessed, and edited between offerings with the most current copy of the course available to be imported into your official course whenever the course is scheduled to run.
VIU requires student work submitted for grades to be kept for one year after the end of the course. If you need to retain student data beyond two academic years after the course is completed, it is possible to export most of the student data in VIULearn for record keeping purposes. For help exporting student data, please email learnsupport@viu.ca
Please note that you are responsible for ensuring data security and privacy protection for materials you export from VIULearn. If you have questions about what data you are expected to retain or about your responsibilities around student data, please speak with your chair.
If you did not export your course before the course was deleted, please fill out the Course Recovery Request Form. You will need to know the course name, year, semester, and offering code. Course recovery requests can only be processed for individuals who were instructors in the requested course.
Student data cannot be recovered, but course materials may be able to be recovered.
Every year, blank course shells are created automatically for every course and section that has been entered into the scheduling and workload system/registration system for that upcoming academic year. For instructional employees who have been at VIU for several years, this can very quickly result in an overwhelming number of courses to sort through each time they need to find something in VIULearn.
In addition to clearing up the instructor and administrative views in VIULearn, the Course Cleanup process minimizes the amount of student data retained in the learning management system. When we established this process in 2018, we chose to keep courses for two academic years after their end date in order to balance the need for instructors to be able to access past materials and the need to minimize the amount of student data we are keeping beyond the length needed for grade dispute resolution or other official VIU purposes.
Instructors can export any course where they have an instructor role to retain an offline course package which contains all content items and course activities so that they can reuse these materials, or even share them with others. VIULearn course packages can even be used in other learning management systems including Moodle and Canvas.