Getting your course out of Moodle
Two settings matter. The rest you can ignore.
Moodle’s backup wizard offers a long list of checkboxes, and almost none of them change what we can convert. Get these two right and the rest can stay exactly as Moodle sets them.
Where to start: open your course, then More › Course reuse › Backup. Older Moodle sites put it under the gear menu or Course administration › Backup. Either way you land on a page titled Initial settings.
Untick everything about users
On Initial settings, clear these:
- Include enrolled users
- Include user role assignments
- Include user completion details
- Include grade history
- Include course logs
Some sites label the first one Include enrolment methods or grey it out entirely. If a box is greyed out, leave it — Moodle is telling you your role cannot include that data anyway, which is fine.
Why this one matters
A backup with user data carries your learners’ names, enrolments, grades and any certificates they were issued. None of it can reach a SCORM package — but unticking these means it never leaves your Moodle in the first place, which is a better place for it to be than on somebody else’s server.
It also makes the file dramatically smaller, which makes everything after this faster.
Leave Include files ticked
It is on by default. Two things to be careful of: some sites turn it off in their defaults, and it is easy to clear by accident when you are busy unticking the boxes above.
- Include activities and resources
- Include files
Why this one matters
Without it the backup describes your course but contains none of it. Every workbook, PDF and image is missing, and the package we build would be an empty shell rather than a slightly reduced course.
We check for this on upload and stop rather than sell you something broken — but noticing it here saves you the round trip.
Everything else: leave it alone
Include blocks, Include filters, Include calendar events, Include question bank, badges, groups, competencies — none of these change the converted package.
We checked rather than assumed: the same course exported twice, once complete and once with 61 files of blocks, filters, roles, groups and badge data stripped out, produced a byte-identical result.
One thing not to tick
IMS Common Cartridge — usually offered as a separate
backup type rather than a checkbox. It produces a different format
entirely, which we cannot read. You want a normal Moodle course backup,
the kind that gives you a .mbz file.
Should I remove the forums and assignments first?
No. It is tempting, since they cannot convert — but the activity list is long, the boxes are small, and people reliably untick something they actually wanted. Those activities are a few kilobytes of text; leaving them in costs you nothing and costs us nothing.
We skip them automatically and list every one, with the reason. You never have to decide which of your activities SCORM can hold.
Then finish the wizard
Click through Next, Next,
Perform backup. When it finishes, download the
.mbz file from the backup area — it is the one with a name
like backup-moodle2-course-137-yourcourse-20260918-1342.mbz.
Converting and previewing the finished course is free. You only pay to download the package.