Avenue Live Help and IT teams have identified a small number of very large and complex courses that are creating significant system strain. These courses affect performance not only for individual instructors and learners but across the entire platform. In some cases, routine in-service support tasks have taken hours to resolve. This reflects a broader system challenge rather than an isolated teaching or design issue.
This new policy is intended to establish clear guidelines for course design, maintenance, and lifecycle. Course design is expected to support a positive learner and instructor experience, system performance, and sustainable support operations. This policy provides recommended limits on course size and structure, including guidance on the number of sections, activities, and question banks. It also outlines standard practices such as creating new courses regularly, using sandbox spaces for content storage, and managing legacy materials appropriately.
Going forward, course size will be monitored and limits will be applied. Courses approaching or exceeding defined thresholds will be flagged, and instructors will be contacted with expectations and timelines to reduce course size. Where required, non-compliant courses may be restricted, modified, or removed in order to maintain system performance.
Avenue Course Efficiency Policy
Purpose
To support a stable, responsive, and equitable learning environment by establishing clear expectations, supports, and enforcement mechanisms for manageable course design.
Course design is expected to support:
- A positive Learner and Instructor experience
- System performance
- Sustainability of support services
Context and Rationale
Avenue Live Help and IT staff report that a small number of instructors are using extremely large, complex courses, leading to:
- Severe system slowdowns and unusable courses
- Excessive support time (e.g., simple tasks taking hours)
- Repeated support incidents from the same users
- Increased strain on support interactions
Technical Analysis
- Large question banks, repeated course copying, and accumulated completion data contribute to performance degradation
- Course size impacts extend beyond individual courses due to shared database load
This represents a system-wide operational risk that requires coordinated policy, communication, and enforcement.
Required Practices
Course lifespan:
- New course recommended at the end of each teaching session, or at minimum every 12 months
Maximum structure:
- ~30 sections and subsections/topics and subtopics (upper limit)
- ~400 total activities/resources (initial threshold)
Other considerations:
- Question banks should be organized and maintained at a manageable size
- Repeated copying of Quizzes and Question Banks across courses is not permitted
- Completion tracking should be used where pedagogically appropriate
- Legacy content should be reviewed and curated before inclusion in live courses
Instructors are expected to:
- Create new courses regularly rather than continuing to expand existing ones indefinitely
- Create and store teacher-created materials in a sandbox course. A Sandbox course is not to be used to store material that is in the Course Builder eUnit Library or available elsewhere (such as on Tutela).
- Selectively use content and eUnits from the course builder
- Maintain courses by removing outdated or unused materials
- Download and maintain their own archives using the Moodle backup function
- Implement recommendations from Avenue Support on improving course performance when requested
System Protections
Avenue reserves the right to:
- Flag courses approaching or exceeding limits
- Require remediation within a defined timeframe (e.g., 30 days)
- Restrict, modify, disable, or remove non-compliant courses where necessary
This new policy is intended to support you and your learners and is not about restricting you or implementing a quota system.
A well-structured course:
- Loads faster
- Is easier to manage
- Provides a better learning experience
