Manage Terms, Courses, and Sections

In this section:

Terminology

Echo360 recognizes that different countries use different names for some of the concepts discussed on this page. For simplicity, this page uses chiefly U.S. terminology.

You can change some terms shown in the ESS interface by changing the language preference in your browser to British English (en-gb). See Show the ESS in British English for details.

Overview

Terms, courses, and sections are created and managed in the EchoSystem Server (ESS) UI, Schedule tab. Courses and sections provide the structure in which to enable various EchoSystem features and therefore are foundational to using EchoSystem. 

Details on creating, configuring, and deleting these items are found on the following pages:


Training Echo

This link below opens a training Echo, which walks you through the basics of course and section  management:

Deleting Objects from the System

Prior to EchoSystem 5.3, in order to delete an object from the system, you had to delete the associated objects first. For example, to delete a course, you first had to delete all of the sections associated with the course. Now the deletion process takes care of that for you, deleting the associated items along with the selected object.

This section is designed to let you know what actually goes on when you delete an object from the EchoSystem.

Most of the deletion process happens in the background. The full process of object deletion works like this:  

  • The item you deleted and all of its associated objects are removed from the interface.
  • The item and its associated objects are marked for deletion in the system.
  • Background cleanup jobs pass through and delete all items marked for deletion.

The reason this is important to know is because the background jobs don't delete items in the same order in which they are removed from the interface. These background deletion jobs have a hierarchy of their own that allows for the efficient and complete removal of objects from the system. This means that depending on what kind of item you just deleted and the number of associated objects also being deleted, the full removal process could take from several hours to several days. Be patient.

If you want to confirm complete deletion, wait a day or two and then run an Audit Report (Reports > Audit Report). Click Export to export the data to a CSV file. Opening the resulting CSV file in a spreadsheet program like Excel allows you to sort and search the report information to determine if all of the appropriate objects were deleted.

If, after seven days, the Audit Report does not show one or more of the deleted items, contact Customer Support.

Best Practice: Defragment the Database After Large-Scale Deletions

High-volume data manipulation, including large scale deletions, may result in a high level of database fragmentation (non-continuous and/or non-full data pages), particularly where large numbers of media files were altered or removed.

While fragmentation does not cause the database to operate incorrectly, it can result in sub-optimal performance. To mitigate this issue, after a large number of objects are deleted from the system, we recommend that you defragment your database, then re-index the ESS. 

Depending on your database type and configuration, defragmentation may occur as an automated background or self-repair job, or may need to be explicitly triggered. Please consult your database documentation for details. For additional information on database defragmentation, refer to the following links:

Microsoft SQL: https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-administration/defragmenting-indexes-in-sql-server-2005-and-2008/
MySQL:  http://blog.softlayer.com/2011/mysql-slow-check-for-fragmentation/

After the database defragmentation is finished, go ahead and re-index the ESS. The easiest way to do this is to:

  1. Navigate to System > System Indexes.
  2. Click the Re-index All on Next ESS Restart button.
  3. Restart the ESS service