Centre for Information Technologies, FoA
E-learning Office
In Autumn 2020, the faculty e-learning environment ELF underwent a major change – transition to a new life cycle.
What does ELF life cycle mean?
The term ELF life cycle, which is the faculty’s installation of the Moodle LMS, is a process that sets out rules for creating individual courses in ELF and, at the same time, also rules for their termination or archiving.
Why is the new life cycle needed?
In the version of ELF used since 2003 tills September 2020 (ELF3), all courses created over the years were stored in one place, even though many of them were no longer actively used in teaching.
Due to the increasing number of courses in ELF, and thus the growing volume of its database, it was necessary to switch to a model where clean Moodle installations intended for specific periods would be regularly deployed. During these periods, a smaller database than the database of ELF is used, and the database in use will no longer grow excessively.
What will the new ELF life cycle look like?
A new, clean version of ELF is be created at the beginning of each academic year.
Therefore, there are multiple versions of ELF existing in parallel. Only one of these versions is active for the current period and the remaining ones areaccessible to users in read-only mode as an archive for five years.
Go to the ELF3 (used tills September 2020) Go to the ELF 20/21
What does the transition to a new life cycle mean for course creators and teachers?
Courses that course creators and teachers will need to work with in the coming academic period can be transferred to the active version of ELF in a way similar to how you have created new copies of your previous courses so far, i.e., by archiving and restoring the original course. However, the course renewal will already take place in the new active version of ELF. To transfer courses to the new version of ELF, see this guide.
The course archiving and restoring process will thus take place between two installations of the Moodle LMS, the old one where the backup will be created, and the active one, and it will now be partially automated.
However, if necessary, teachers can also contact the CIT FoA E-learning Office user support staff and ask them to recover the course they need in the active version of ELF manually.
What are the benefits of the new ELF life cycle?
The benefits of this model are, in particular, increased ELF security and stability, faster system response, and better data usability for analytical purposes.
Other information
What you might be asking
Will the old versions of ELF still be available in the future (for example ELF 20/21)?
Yes, but they will have a different web address and it will be in read-only mode. The address elf.phil.muni.cz, which points to the currently used ELF version, will always point to the respective active version in the future. The old ELF versions will therefore be regularly moved to different web addresses. However, they will always be easily accessible from the active ELF version by clicking on a clearly visible link.
Would you like to know more or ask a question?