Getting your course out of Moodle
Backing up your Moodle course, one screen at a time
Never made a Moodle backup before? That’s fine — it’s five screens and a few clicks. This page follows Moodle’s backup wizard screen by screen, so you can keep it open beside your course and simply do what it says.
Already have a .mbz file, or can’t get into Moodle any more?
No worries — send us the backup you have. Anything in it that SCORM can’t carry, like forums or assignments, we leave out automatically, and your report lists every one. Even a backup with your learners’ information in it is fine: we point it out before anything is uploaded, and you can carry on — learner records never make it into a SCORM package.
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.
Initial settings
This first screen is a long list of checkboxes. You only want two of them ticked:
- Include activities and resources
- Include files
Untick everything else. Those two are the parts of your course that can become SCORM — your pages, files, videos and quizzes. The rest can’t go into a SCORM package, so there’s no reason to send it.
A handy order for unticking
Untick all the other boxes first, and leave Include enrolled users until last. When you untick that one, Moodle greys out the other user boxes — things like user role assignments, user completion details and course logs. Some of them may still show a tick. That’s fine: without enrolled users, none of that information goes into the backup, so leave them be.
One exception, if your course has quizzes
Some Moodle sites (version 4 and older) also show Include question bank. Leave that one ticked: without it, Moodle leaves your quizzes out of the backup completely. If you don’t see that box, you’re on a newer Moodle and there’s nothing to do.
One thing not to choose
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.
Then click Next.
Schema settings
Now Moodle lists everything in your course — every section, activity and resource, each with a checkbox. This is where you choose what ends up in your SCORM course.
- Leave ticked: everything you want to keep
- Untick: anything you want left out
Not sure about something? Leave it ticked. And don’t worry about forums, assignments and the like: we skip anything SCORM can’t carry, and your report tells you which.
Then click Next.
Confirmation and review
Moodle shows a summary of what you chose, with a filename at the top. We suggest leaving the filename just as it is: it already includes the course name and today’s date, which makes it easy to find later.
Click Perform backup.
Perform backup
Moodle builds your backup, with a progress bar while it works. A big course can take a few minutes. Leave the page open until it finishes.
Complete
Moodle tells you the backup file was created successfully.
Click Continue.
Now download your backup file
Continue takes you to your course’s backup area: a list of the backup files for this course. Find the one you just made (it has today’s date in its name) and click Download beside it.
That saves a file ending in .mbz, with a name like
backup-moodle2-course-137-yourcourse-20260918-1342.mbz.
That’s the file we turn into SCORM. Nice work
— the hard part is done.
Converting and previewing the finished course is free. You only pay to download the package.