TII Class Term Limits

[mhughes2k]

We have just discovered that there is a "term limit" on TII classes of 5 years.

Most of classes are reset via the Moodle course reset, as part of a batched process, each summer, and:

The reset process you have described points using a batch process to carry out the course reset. The Support Engineer has confirmed this is an unsupported method which could account for the unexpected behaviour

(so really the method is for 5000 class sites to all have the Class Reset manually & interactively triggered?!? TII Folk see Turnitin Support Case 10151347)

However some classes do not and continue on "infinitely".

It appears that eventually these classes will hit the 5 year term limit in TII, and at this point the TII API is no longer able to update settings, and student submissions are then not uploaded to TII for processing.

The suggested solution from TII support is to do a class reset or copy the (Moodle class), neither of which are options, as: 1) Doing a class reset that will trigger TII to do it's reset process, requires the reset_assign_submissions or reset_forum_all (probably more) to be enabled. These settings will delete existing student content from Moodle, which is bad mid-way through an academic year. 2) Copying the Moodle site is not the same as "cloning" the site, as the configurations (such as enrolment methods) may change as a consequence, as user data would need to be retained so that student work is not lost.

I have a few suggestions:

1. Make visible somewhere obvious the Turnitin Age of a Class, and allow the setting of "Maximum Turnitin Class Age", which is <= Turnitin's term limit.
2. If a class reaches the "Maximum Turnitin Class Age" then:
   1. Display a warning some where very obvious in the course and assignments that without a class reset being done bad things will start to happen.
   2. Provide a mechanism to get Turnitin to generate a new TII class and link it with the affected Moodle class, in the same way that class reset does but without having to trash all of the Moodle submissions, and re-submits all of the relevant TII content to this new site assignments.
3. Provide 2.2 so that Moodle Admins can do this re-linking of a Moodle Class to a new TII class at any time.

[mhughes2k]

So this is still a thing, and has been a topic of discussion on the Moodle forums where TII support have been saying that the class term limit is a Moodle thing (it's not BTW).

Could we please have a mechanism that allows us to decide what happens with Turnitin classes and which Moodle course is linked to which one.

At the moment the only mechanism is to do a class reset, and now the code apparently only unlinks from the Term Limited TII class if all modules have been reset.

It does appear that TII does know how old a TII class is because the API log is coming back with something like: "date_due - cannot exceed the term length of the class date_post - cannot exceed the term length of the class".

Please can we just have a button added to course settings that just allows us to link the class and all it's relevant modules to a whole new, separated TII class code. Even if this just need to delete all of the reference links in the Moodle DB and the "new" class to be create on the next request / update.

The reason for this is that there are cases where we want a whole "new" TII class (if only to deal with the term limit) but we don't actually want to delete any of our Moodle content, and getting this new TII class shouldn't be contingent on us deleting our content.

Or "why is there a term limit on TII classes?"