Can I safely delete a course once its enrollments have been cross-listed elsewhere?

Question

Canvas root admin here.  We have a whole bunch of courses with zero enrollments after their enrollments became section enrollments in other courses.  We have no need for these empty courses now.  I know I can check the box for "hide courses with no enrollments" but I am hoping to clean up the data so when we pull a report of all courses we don't have hundreds of useless empty courses that should never have been courses in the first place.

What happens to the now cross-listed enrollments if I now delete the original empty course?  Hoping nothing so I can proceed with clearing the dead wood.

melodyc_lam · Accepted Answer

@Ben_Cohan

Great question! I tried looking in the guides and I don't see anything that seems like it would be a negative consequence, besides being unable to de-cross-list the section from the new course. I normally don't delete anything as sometimes the de-cross-list need does come up.

I would advise using your BETA or TEST environment to test out deleting the old empty course and observe what happens.

Hope this helps!

paul_fynn · Accepted Answer

Hi @Ben_Cohan,

as @melodyc_lam notes, the primary concern is that should you crosslist in error, facts change on the ground, or someone changes their mind, then you would not be able to restore the original course. Remember also that any activity undertaken in the pre-crosslisted original will be preserved in the original (we counsel strongly against crosslisting once learning is under way).

In our institution my faculty is the most prolific user of crosslisting, and we crosslist around 28% of our courses - so we have around 300 crosslists per academic year. Whilst our courses are created via SIS import, our crosslists are not, although we do have middleware that allows us to manage crosslisting manually (we also use a 'Redundant crosslist' to 'hide' courses which were provisioned but are no longer required. in preference to deleting)

*  My view on this is that we need to be able to 'co-list' rather than 'crosslist' course instances without creating a redundant shell each time* We can predict in advance 95% of crosslist requirements, so this could be set up in the middleware as a data / conversion table prior to provisioning
* Where a crosslist requirement exists, a modified process would create only the 'parent' course shell, not 'child' course shells
* The separate 'child' SIS occurrences would then be added as course specific sections to the parent course (which we do already for community sites which draw on the cohort identifier to create sections in Award level sites)

I think that this is something that should be configurable in the local import management protocols for any large organisation - it might be beneficial if Canvas were to incorporate an option to retain or remove the original child sites within the existing crosslisting tool. As nothing really gets deleted from Canvas, I would expect that removal would simply be a change to the visibility flag and could be recovered in future ...