Mass Delete Non-SIS Courses

Question

I am wanting to do some cleanup in our environment and delete some old Sandbox courses of staff that has left the district. Rather than doing this 1 course at a time, I found a post that mentioned to assign a course_id to those non-sis courses, then change the status to deleted and reimport the file. I ran a provisioning report and found the courses I want to delete, then filled in the course_id column with an ID for each course. Did a SIS Import and everything looked great, but when I checked on the course using the Canvas Course_ID to make sure it assigned the course_id, I figured out that this actually duplicated the course. Now, there are two of them to get rid of - 1 with a course_id and 1 without.

I know there is an API that will help this, but I have no idea how to use APIs, so not really much help there. Is there anything I can do to the import file that would keep from duplicating the course and just add the course_id to the exsisting course?

Robert · Answer

Hi @lhenson

There is a bulk api for courses update, but it is limited to 500 at a time.

https://developerdocs.instructure.com/services/canvas/resources/courses#method.courses.batch_update

Testing this against your beta or test instance would be the best way to ensure you get the request setup correctly and target the correct course id's. A program like Postman would make this easier to manage if you don't have scripting ability.

the other option is the live api. https://*instructure.com/doc/api/live#!/courses.json/update_courses_put_22

lhenson · Answer

@melodyc_lam Thank you so much for your response. I don't know hardly anything about using APIs, but from what I can figure out, this will still just delete 1 course at a time. Oh well - thank you for your input.

melodyc_lam · Answer

@lhenson I don't think there's any way to do this through the SIS import files unfortunately. The problem is that the SIS import file can't take in the Canvas course ID (which is separate from the course_id field on the SIS Import template, which refers to the SIS ID of the course.)

Thankfully the duplicates are easy to delete, just reimport your SIS import file with status being deleted, but that doesn't solve the original problem.

The only way that I've found to work with courses that don't have a SIS ID is to use a combination of the Provisioning report (which will contain all courses that exist in the Canvas account/subaccount with their associated Canvas course ID) and the API to call the Delete/Conclude Course endpoint.