These guidelines have been created to assist you with creating an archive of your Cobra courses for future use. Archives of courses prior to 2016 will be maintained by PDIT and you can contact them (cobralearning@parkland.edu) to request an archive from a prior course. Starting with 2016, PDIT will no longer be archiving course content and the 2016 content will be purged from the system at the end of 2018.

Note: This does NOT apply to student data. Student data will be archived and maintained by PDIT for five years.

Exporting Archived Course

Follow these steps for exporting your course as an archived file:

1. Go to the course you want to archive.
2. Go to Course Admin in the navigation bar, and select Import/Export/Copy Components.
3. Select Export Components, leaving the box checked to include course files in the export package, then click Start.
4. Select the course items to be included in the archive (we suggest selecting all), and click Continue
5. Confirm the course content to be included and click Continue.

Depending on the size of your course, this may take a few minutes to an hour. If your course contains a lot of material such as Power Point files and video, it will take longer to process.

Once the course content is packaged, click Finish. Then, click the link to download the file to your computer.

Note: if you accidentally click away from this page, you will need to repeat the above steps to repackage the course materials.

You can store this zipped file on your computer, external hard drive or thumb drive until you need it.

Note: the archived package that you download will contain ONLY your course materials. It will NOT include students on the classlist nor will it include their grades or any submissions. No student information is contained in this archive package.

Importing an Archive Package

When you are in need of importing an archived course, follow the steps below.

Note: this only needs to be done if you have not taught this course in a while. Typically, you can copy from another course that is on the current system.

1. Go to the new/empty course on the system.
2. Go to Course Admin in the navigation bar, and select Import/Export/Copy Components.
3. Select Import Components, then click Start.
4. Click the Upload button and navigate to the drive where the archive package is located. Select the zipped file (it needs to remain zipped) and click Open.
5. Allow the package to be processed for uploading, and then click Import All Components to start the import process.

Again, depending on the size of your course, this make take a few minutes to an hour to import. Once it is complete, click on the View Content button to view the imported materials.

Note: some external learning tools, such as publisher links, may not appear in Content. You will need to re-establish those links in the course. Review all content for "broken topic" link that will need to be restored or removed.  Additionally, nav bars, release conditions, grade settings, groups, homepages, intelligent agents, links, and widgets are not included in the import.  Those items will need to be recreated.

If you need assistance with the archiving process, please contact the Tech Help desk or you may review this video tutorial.