It seems like we have everything ready to go for our virtual community. We've reviewed how to build these courses, but now we need to understand how we can protect our course data from being corrupted or lost, whether by users or by technology. The first step in safeguarding our courses is exporting and archiving the courses.
Before we jump into the exporting and archiving processes, we should define what these options are and how they differ from each other:
Course Exports: This process takes the contents of our course shell that the instructor has created, such as items, folders, tests, assignments, settings, grade center columns, and others, from a course. This process is similar to the Copy process discussed in the previous chapter; however, instead of putting these files into a destination course, they go into a ZIP file.
Course Archive: This process creates a zip file as well. However, the archive contains not only the instructor-created...