LMS Data Retention and Storage

Course Archiving and Retention

To efficiently utilize the storage usage allotted by our LMS provider, courses will be retained and then archived for the number of years listed below, in accordance with the North Carolina Community College Records Retention Schedule. Once a course is archived, it is removed from the LMS and will no longer appear in an instructor’s course list.

Three Years in the LMS

Distance Learning will retain a course with student data within the LMS for three years from the time it was taught.

• Courses will remain hidden from students but visible for instructors who need to access them for assessment data or for importing previous course components. 

• During this time, Instructors are not to alter the used instructional content, assignments, and grades of their previously taught courses. This helps keep the integrity of the course intact for any disputes that may arise and prevents student data loss.

Two Years in off-site Storage

After the three years in the LMS, the course will be removed from the LMS and be kept on a backup hard drive for two more years.

Sixth Year Course Deletion

After the two-year storage on the backup hard drive, the course and student data will be deleted from the hard drive.

Student Enrollment Retention in the LMS

Students who have not accessed the LMS for more than five years will be removed.

Course Backups

All current and open running courses are automatically backed-up in the LMS the moment a change or event is triggered in a course. These back-ups are downloaded every morning, Monday - Friday, from the SFTP server to an external hard drive. Once downloaded, the backups are deleted from the SFTP server to reduce our storage usage.