Account templates for manually-moved courses

Question

Hi all! So a little bit of background about the way our system works: Our courses are populated into Canvas by our SIS, but they are all dumped into our main account. Before the beginning of each semester, I manually run a CSV upload to separate those courses into their proper sub-accounts.

My school has recently decided that they want templates made for each program. I love it, super happy to do it, but how will this work for the way our courses are made in the system? My understanding of course templates is that they are only applied when the course is actually made. If I have to move the courses into their sub-accounts manually after they're made, and each sub-account will have it's own template, will the courses adopt the template when they are moved into the sub-account? Or will I have to apply the templates manually? If I do have to apply them manually, anyone have any suggestions on the best workflow for that?

Fixing the SIS to apply the sub-accounts is already a conversation I've had with IT, and it's a no-go. Too cost-prohibitive. I'd love any advice!

Chris · Accepted Answer

Hi @KeriSalyards,

In he scenario you're describing, where courses are all created in one account (I'll say Account A) and then you move them to different accounts later (Account B, C, D, etc), the only template that would get applied automatically to the courses would be the template set up for Account A.  If Account B, C, D have their own templates, you'd have to basically do an import of that template course into each course manually (you could perhaps use some scripting/APIs to try to reduce workload if you're familiar with programming).  I don't really know any other alternative methods for doing this...

As you already seem to know, your SIS would ideally put everything in the right place to being with, but you said that's out of the question due to cost right now.  It may be worth having more conversations about that in the future though, as I'm sure doing all of the work manually is going to take you a significant amount of time, and time does equal money too!

-Chris