Good housekeeping requires one to take some time every day to overview our environment, dust off what we still want to use and clear away the trash. Likewise, we should spend some time on a regular basis on the upkeep of our courses in the Moodle learning environment.
Most teachers have only a limited number of courses active at any given time, but that does not mean the other courses under their care should be ignored. In fact, we should be updating and improving our courses while we are not using them instead of during the actual running of the courses. Improving courses while they are on stand by gives us the time to reflect about the best tool for the tasks in the course. Teachers could consider trying something new, like a quiz or a lesson, auto-graded tasks that may help reduce the workload that running the course entails.
In stead of requesting a new copy for each new run of a course, it is more efficient to rename and reset an older version and reuse it. This would help to limit the number of courses on your MyMoodle page as well as the number of of abandoned (“orphaned”) course environments in Moodle. Note that it is possible to import selected course material from one course environment into another, which implies that you could keep one course as a repository of your course materials and draw from that collection for your various running courses.
If a course is really finished and there is no need anymore for either the course or the course materials, please, inform the eLearning Centre and we will recycle the course into a sparkly clean empty environment for new course requests. This is what we will do for any orphaned courses that are not reclaimed by their teachers from our Lost & Found category. Course materials found in said abandoned courses may or may not be saved for future use.