Question

Dear Canvas, why do you insist on pushing all the default pages, modules, navigation apps, and assignments that I then have to go in and delete every year? Is my school district doing this or are you? I clean all this crap up every year. Next year starts. I copy over last years course and I have to go back in and delete all the same garbage out again...and again...and here we go again. Should I complain to you or my school district?

Love you 😉

707mrk

Chris_Hofer · Accepted Answer

Hello there, @707mrk ...

I'm a bit confused what you mean by "default" pages, modules, navigation apps, assignments, etc.  Would you be able to provide an example or two (maybe including a screenshot or two being careful not to show any student data) of exactly what you are seeing on your screen and what you are deleting?  My suspicion is that this might be something you could work with your school's Canvas admin (or someone from your school's Online Learning / eLearning / Distance Education) team on, but it might be good to see an example here, too, since we do not have access to your school's Canvas environment or any of your Canvas courses.

Thanks, and looking forward to hearing back from you soon.  Take care...be well.

Ron_Bowman · Accepted Answer

@707mrk in addition to what @Chris_Hofer mentioned, I will suggest the following.  At my institution our Canvas admin team setup what we call parent courses.  These are permanent courses assigned to instructors for courses they normally teach (i.e named PC_CPE200 - Intro to programming).  Then you as an instructor set it up however you want with whatever material you want.  Then at the beginning of the semester, the actual course page can be completely gutted (delete everything that you are allowed to delete - we have some admin stuff that is fixed and cannot be removed).  You then do a complete canvas copy of a course of your pc course material to your current semester course.  I highly recommend that you talk to your admins to find out if something like that is possible.

Ron

oneilllj · Accepted Answer

Hi @707mrk

Similar to what @Ron_Bowman and @Chris_Hofer have mentioned, it sounds like your school might be using Parent or Blueprint courses. We use these as all the content is created in the Blueprint or parent account with no students connected to the course and it ensures students receive the same content and our naming conventions for courses and assignments are adhered to. Once the Blueprint is prepared (by the Bp manager or owner responsible for managing this) we associate the Blueprint course to the timetabled courses and all the course content is then transferred across.

At the beginning of each academic year we create new Blueprint shells for the courses, staff import the necessary content, revise or add in extra information as may be needed and then we associate and sync. Teachers can then publish the courses for student access.

Hope this helps in some way.

Thanks

Jen