Originally published January 27, 2020
It’s 8 am, you have barely finished your 3rd coffee and you are working away in your course for next year when you suddenly realised you made a big mistake. Maybe you copied the wrong set of content in, maybe you misspelled ‘consensus’ everywhere. It happens. You want to start over. Well – we now have you covered.
In February 2020 we will be releasing our long-standing, most voted for item on our Product Idea Exchange:
Let’s talk about it! What it is, how it will work, our confusing feelings about it, and why I should stop watching Marvel movies.
What is the Course Reset?
Course Reset is a course-level only tool found in the Course Admin area. It is primarily meant to undo human errors in the ‘copy and content creation’ process that can occur when you have multiple courses named similar names, that also look similar, across multiple semesters. (Don’t worry, we are also fixing that root problem as well.)
It will reset the course back to an empty shell in a single, permanent action. A key feature is that it will not affect user enrollments or section associations. You can optionally exclude resetting groups and/or some course design elements.
What is a permanent action?
This isn’t your average course UI delete. This means it will not create a mess of your data or your logs. It also means that there is no restore. We have essentially purged the elements in the course.
To reduce the chance of unintentional deletes, we have put it behind a permission that needs to be expressly given for the tool to be visible. Access to the tool has nothing to do with other delete or course administration permissions.
Why a permanent, bulk action?
Deleting interconnected objects is complicated. This is the primary reason this tool was requested. The same things that make deleting an object through the UI complicated, is the same in the backend. Creating a single action that wipes the associated tables without needing to worry about bits and pieces of interconnected things needing to be restored, or remain available, was the safest option for an error-free experience.
Why didn’t we do this earlier?
D2L product roadmap is shaped by many inputs. PIE is one. In the last two years, we have doubled down on our commitment to aligning roadmap to PIE. Even so, creating a Delete All button made everyone a little nervous.
What’s this confusing mix of Excitement and Nervousness I’m feeling?
It’s normal. We’re all feeling it. To tamper that nervousness, we took extra precautions to surface important data and ensure that there was enough friction in the workflow that users will think more than usual before acting (see, I did read all the comments in the idea!). For example, we require that you enter the same course code as the course you are trying to reset to activate the delete button. Cool, right?
In Conclusion
Releasing the Course Reset comes with mixed feelings for me. I’m super proud of the team that pulled this together. I know this will have a big workflow benefit for many people, and reduce the time it takes for admins and others to correct mistakes and empty sandbox courses. However, I imagine we have released something that may feel like the Infinity Gauntlet into the wild and I expect some concerns will be raised from various parties.
Of course, our Gauntlet has WAY more stones than the original.
And I suppose the SNAP is a button in this situation.
Also, I’m not exactly a mad titan, so every client can get one without battling me for it.
My engineering director has noted this is a terrible analogy because we do delete everything, not a random 50% of your data.
So not much like the Gauntlet in the end.
Still. I already made this image of Course Reset as the Infinity Glove, and it took me a solid 15 minutes, so I stand by it.
See you in PIE. Happy Snapping.