Templates vs Blueprints

DiannaDK

Hello, I come to the community seeking your input. We are a small, rural K12 district and have been using templates for our secondary courses for three years now. It's starting to get messy. I love the consistency it creates for our homepages and it allows us to create spaces that are accessibility-friendly. The challenge is that courses are getting cluttered with a lot of duplicate content. Blueprints have always intimidated me. I'm working to understand them better, but I would love if other Canvas users could share their experiences with blueprints.

We would like to create more consistency at the elementary level as well and currently use the C4E interface.

I am also interested in hearing how you implemented the blueprints and what you've found to be the easiest way to get them set up. It's time to think about the 26-27 school year and I would love to learn from you!

melodyc_lam

@DiannaDK I could probably write a huge blog on blueprinting and templating when I get a chance but I can speak to how to set blueprints up. I'm at a very large K12 with around 10-15K courses per year that get blueprinted. Also the discussion here is more on the "technical" side of things.

So, unlike Templating, your blueprint has to sit at an account that's "above" or "at" the target course's account in order for the course to blueprint.

One other thing to consider is that a blueprint is "live" once you associate a course with a blueprint — so any changes to the blueprint will sync over to the associated courses when you either 1) associate a new course to the blueprint or 2) do a sync from the UI.

The basic steps of blueprinting at my district are as follows:

1. Create template for blueprinting with consistent homepage and navigation setup — this also can contain things like resources, module setup, etc.
2. Create "staging" subaccounts — there's a few:
   1. "Graveyard" - put old blueprints here
   2. "Staging" - this is where blueprints that are ready will be moved from here to the correct account
   3. "Primary/Secondary" - we split up blueprints this way because our early college/middle college schools start earlier. Also we can apply C4E on "primary" subaccount. These are labeled by year and cleaned up after each year, but you don't have to do this.
3. Our academics department goes through blueprinting and requirements and creates blueprints.
   1. Blueprints should be done before your SIS rollover.
4. When blueprints are ready I move them to the right subaccount to get ready to blueprint. This depends on your account setup. I highly do not recommend putting blueprints at the root level.
5. Course Associations can be done through the UI but you're limited to 100 at a time per blueprint. I do this through a SIS import with a "mapping" file to map course codes (that are in the title of the courses) to the correct blueprint.
6. Once SIS rollover starts I blueprint around 2 days afterwards just in case there's issues (we've had many issues through the years due to our size so I build that time into the whole process).
   1. I have a set of scripts that do this for me although in a pinch one year I did it manually for our schools that started early.

Some considerations on the technical side of things:

1. How are you preventing your blueprint creators from inadvertently editing live blueprints, or in particular cases, adding teachers to the blueprint and having others potentially edit blueprints?
   1. One way is to make sure that you remove blueprint creators from the blueprint before you start associating courses, but then you'll need a process to add them back into the course if needed (ex. emergency edits, resource not working or needs to be replaced, etc.)
2. How are you blueprinting as new courses get created that need a blueprint?
   1. I script this part out but that's because we get new courses created daily as teacher of record changes occur. Depending on how often this happens at your district you can probably get away with a manual association.
3. Disassociating a blueprint from a course does not remove blueprinted material in the course. You also cannot have a course have more than one blueprint associated with it at a time.
   1. This is where templating can really help. If all courses need a particular setup, or even some courses need a particular setup, that's where having the "staging subaccount" helps to apply the correct template to the correct blueprints.

I'll probably write more as I think of other considerations or thoughts. Hope this helps with starting to think about blueprinting.