Access to Three Years of Courses in CoursePlus
For many years, students, faculty, and staff have had access to CoursePlus sites for a maximum of two academic years. A course site was visible for the academic year in which the course was offered, and the following academic year. This met the needs of a large number of people who use CoursePlus, but not all.
Students in part-time programs and students in doctoral programs are in those programs for longer than two academic years. Not being able to see courses from more than one academic year in the past could be problematic as students prepared for capstones or oral examinations.
In early January, the CoursePlus team quietly rolled out the ability for students, faculty, and staff to have access to CoursePlus sites for a maximum of three academic years. Therefore, if a student takes a course in the third term of AY2018-2019, the students have access to that course site through May 31, 2021 — three full academic years. This change is also retroactive, so everyone now has access to their sites from the 2016-2017 academic year.
While it would be wonderful to offer access to any course taken by any student at any time (or set up by any faculty member at any time), there are finite resources at play which make keeping sites available indefinitely a probematic proposition. We must balance the need for fast access to the sites for currently running courses with the need of a much smaller population to access courses which ran in the past.
Remember also that CoursePlus provides tools for students, faculty, and staff to quickly download all files in an Online Library, or the content of online lectures — the very materials most people have requested when wanting to view courses from four, five, six, or more years in the past.
We hope that access to three academic years worth of courses will help everyone access the content they need from CoursePlus, when they need it.