Hello! We had another situation where a professor updated some Files that she set up for her courses but didn't realize that update was going to overwrite the files in all sections of the course, past and present. This professor updated her Final Exam question file from which her course pulls a random 5 questions. She did this for her newly developed upcoming summer course without realizing that it was going to overwrite/clobber her currently running spring course. Therefore, the random questions that the students were receiving in the spring course's final exam asked questions from books that they'd never been assigned. I told the professor what occurred and that we'd have to have the original file restored but it was too last minute and she had to wave the final exam grade. We discussed this issue in the Redevelopment meeting and our Instructional Designers were shocked that this situation can occur. The last time it occurred I know I mentioned to you that it was really dangerous. (In that example, we had an on-campus professor who was asked to teach a course he never taught and wanted me to clone the online version of the course for him. He then proceeded to modify the course in his on-campus versus and deleted some files that were created. This clobbered all the files even ones taught from several years ago. It left our online professor of the course dead in the water and we had to have you restore it for us.)
Please know that I understand what is occurring. It's a hard file that exists on your server and you don't continually make copies of that file with each new semester that it runs. However, i feel that it would be very helpful and prudent to at least offer a popup warning sign, even better if it's blinking and has an accompanying fog horn, to say:
"You are about to permanently change this file and it will be changed in all courses, past and present, that use this file. If you do not want previous courses that have used this file to be overwritten, then you need to create a new file with a new name."
Thank you! Let me know if this is possible.
