Archiving classes for the new academic year Follow
By default, archiving begins annually late June/early July for the Northern Hemisphere, and late December for the Southern Hemisphere. If your school has specific archiving requirements, please contact the Hapara Support team to discuss these.
In this article
- Overview
- What is archiving?
- How to run a full archive
- How to run a partial archive
- Setting up for a new academic year
- Deleting historical class groups
Overview
Hāpara Teacher Dashboard, Highlights and Workspace show classes that are currently being taught in a school or school district. At the end of semesters or academic years, classes that have ended should be archived so that new classes can be added.
You can perform a full archive — archiving all current classes in Hāpara — or a partial archive, where you specify a list of classes to archive. The latter is useful at the end of semesters if you have courses that only run for one semester.
This document describes what archiving does from the teacher and student perspectives, how to run the archiving process, and what to do when starting a new academic year.
What is archiving?
From a teacher's perspective:
- The completed year's classes are no longer visible in Hāpara, and an error is displayed when logging in to Hāpara Teacher Dashboard or Highlights.
- Workspace is still accessible directly, but Workspaces are no longer organized by class. They can be found under Owned by me or Shared with me.
- All class and student content is still accessible through Google Drive. Teachers maintain edit rights to their class folders, so they can navigate through the 'Shared with me' section of Drive to locate archived class and student folders.
- Once classes have been archived, teachers can move class folders from previous years for their own filing purposes. For example, teachers may want to create a "Historical Classes" folder, and move the previous class root folders into it. Note: If a teacher has enabled Google Drive Sync with a local computer, then the teacher may want to disable this for the "Historical Classes" folder. Otherwise, when teachers move class root folders into it, all student-created content for the class will be copied to the teacher's computer, consuming large amounts of network bandwidth and disk space.
- Hāpara Highlights will no longer be available for the classes that have been archived.
- Students subject folders are renamed to include the academic year suffix.
- Student subject folders are removed from their My Drive folder and remain accessible through a My Archive folder, found in 'Shared with me'.
- The My Archive folder contains a folder for each academic year, and those folders contain students' subject folders for the corresponding years.
- Write access is changed to 'read-only' access to student subject folders. Any existing docs in the student subject folders remains as is - ie: no doc permissions are changed.
- The previous year's classes will no longer appear in the dropdown filter in Student Dashboard.
- Any Workspaces that are still active will move to the bottom of the Workspace tab in the Student Dashboard in a collapsed list, until the Workspace is archived by the teacher, the students are removed from the Workspace or the Workspace is unpublished by the teacher.
- Any documents attached to a Workspace will still be available to the student in the Workspace folder in Drive. Once a Workspace is archived by the teacher, this work will be available in an Archived folder.
How to run a full archive
- Log in to the Hapara Admin Console.
- Browse to Data Loader > Archive Classes.
- Specify the archiving label to be used. This is usually the academic year suffix of the classes to be archived (e.g., "2016", or "1617" for the academic year). This will be used to name folders in the archiving process.
- To archive all classes, select the option Archive all classes currently displayed in Hāpara products. For instructions on running a partial archive, please see Running a Partial Archive
- Click Start Archiving All Classes.
Once archiving has finished, a 'Complete' message should display - same as a Data Load. While archiving is running, you will see 'In progress' displayed and refreshing the page should increment the number of processes below this message.
Hapara archiving has error management built in, so you may see 'retry' messages, and if you are not confident archiving has completed, or receive an error when attempting to load new data please open a ticket with our Support team. If this is urgent, please assign the priority as 'Critical'.
Note: Archiving can take from half an hour to many hours, depending on the number of students in your school and the number of subject folders loaded to each class.
How to run a partial archive
Partial archiving may be used for classes that run for only a single semester while other classes, that you don't want to archive, run the whole year; or you may have classes that you don't want to archive as they run over several years.
- First prepare a Google Spreadsheet of classes to be archived. The spreadsheet must:
- Have a column with the header "mailbox". This column should list Google group email addresses of classes to be archived. Eg: room1-1617
- Be shared with the school.apps.owner account. Usually school.apps.owner@studentdomain
- Log in to the Hāpara Admin Console.
- Browse to Data Loader > Archive Classes.
- Specify the archiving label to be used. This is usually the academic year suffix of the classes to be archived (e.g., "2016", or "1617" for the academic year). This will be used to name folders in the archiving process.
- Under Archiving Options, select Archive a subset of classes currently displayed in Hāpara products. You must specify a Google spreadsheet that contains the list of classes to archive.
- This will enable Select The Spreadsheet
- Enter the name of the Google Spreadsheet of classes to be archived
- Click Verify access to archive classes spreadsheet
- Click Start archiving classes on spreadsheet
Once archiving has finished, a 'Complete' message should display - same as a Data Load. While archiving is running, you will see 'In progress' displayed and refreshing the page should increment the number of processes below this message.
Hāpara archiving has error management built in, so you may see 'retry' messages, and if you are not confident archiving has completed, or receive an error when attempting to load new data please open a ticket with our Support team. If this is urgent, please assign the priority as 'Critical'.
Note: Archiving can take from half an hour to many hours, depending on the number of students in your school and the number of subject folders loaded to each class.
Setting up for a new academic year
Once archiving is complete, no classes will be shown in Hāpara Teacher Dashboard, Workspace, Highlights or Student Dashboard.
You're now ready to load classes for the new academic year. Please see our Heading back to school with Hāpara, and our Administrator refresher article for help setting up new classes or to book a session with our Implementation team.
Deleting historical class groups
As part of the archiving process, we do not delete old class groups so over time you may find now unused class Google Groups in your domains. The main reason we do not automatically delete these groups is in order to maintain the yearly class hierarchy, both for organizational purposes and in case we add an "archived classes" view in the future -- which would likely utilize these group memberships. Additionally, many schools continue to use these historical groups to email students from past classes.
However, we also appreciate good housekeeping, and you are ok to go ahead and delete the old groups once archiving has been completed if you do not wish to retain them. If you'd prefer to just delete all these historical groups or delete a bulk lot of groups, please submit a support request advising which groups you’d like to delete and we'd be happy to help with this.