ELF Life Cycle¶
The term ELF lifecycle refers to the process that establishes the rules for creating individual courses in ELF and reusing them, as well as the rules for terminating or archiving them.
From autumn 2020, this process takes a new form. A separate version of the ELF is created for each academic year. Instructors can transfer their existing courses into this new version and continue to use or edit them, while older courses remain in the original versions of ELF, which serve as an archive.
The address elf.phil.muni.cz always leads to the current version of the ELF, while older versions are available via links in the top navigation bar of the ELF (Term dropdown menu).
Why was it necessary to introduce such a process?¶
Until 2020, there was only one version of ELF that stored all courses created across the years since 2003 in one place, even though many of these courses were no longer actively used in teaching.
Due to the ever-increasing number of courses in ELF, the environment was becoming user-unfriendly. The increasing number of courses was also linked to the growth in the size of the database and the resulting technical problems.
The system of separate ELF versions for each period thus avoids the problems associated with the constant accumulation of courses in the system.
What are the advantages of this process¶
The lifecycle based on creating separate versions for each period brings the following advantages:
- more clean enviroment: teachers and learners no longer see on the front page of ELF all the courses they have been enrolled in over the years, but only those they are currently using,
- systematic archiving of content: older versions of courses are available for the next 5 years in the corresponding version of ELF and learners can return to them,
- more accurate statistics: by having separate versions of ELF, we can better determine how many active courses have been used in a given period,
- stability and speed: the new lifecycle avoids the gradual disproportionate increase in database size, making ELF more stable and faster than using one version of ELF for a long time,
- maintenance and security: the new life cycle makes it easier to upgrade ELF to higher versions and to deal with obsolescence of some of its components, making the whole system more secure.
Frequently asked questions¶
Where and for how long are older versions of ELF available?¶
Older versions of ELF are available via links in the top navigation bar of ELF (Term menu), their contents are available in read-only mode. These archived versions are kept for five years.