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Utility for deleting duplicates?

jamin_hoffman

We have been tasked with removing all old and duplicate assignments, pages, and modules from our Master classes before the end of the school year (in 6 days!). Is there an easier way to do this other than scrolling through each of these independently one by one? It seems like there should be a utility that can at least help us find them. It would also be great to be able to sort them by title or date created, etc. Finally, why doesn't Canvas overwrite duplicates (like it says it will!) rather than just allowing the duplicates to both be present?

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Accepted answers

Shar

Hi @jamin_hoffman ,

Great question about removing the duplicates. I recently faced a similar situation and my resolution to was to do a fresh Import into a new source course. By keeping the required items in the modules, including creating a module for the homepage or extra "support" discussions that are normally pinned to the Discussions Index but do not exist anywhere else, I then Imported Modules (plus Canvas Settings, Syllabus, External Tools, Learning Outcomes) into a fresh shell. 🤓

The beautiful thing about importing modules is that the extra things come along like Files and Rubrics. And presto!, a beautiful clean shell with just the needed bits and pieces. Then I archived the former source course so that nothing was lost or deleted. The fresh shell + selective import is definitely the way to go. 😎 Because it was definitely difficult to see duplicate discussions (with the same names) and not know which ones were the real ones. 😅

And yeah TidyUp! is a blessing if you have CidiLabs, but I did not have it in that Canvas instance.
Cheers - Shar ⭐

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Chris_Hofer

Hi @jamin_hoffman …

I vaguely (and honestly, I'm not sure if I'm remembering this correctly) recall seeing someone had a way of deleting duplicate and unneeded content from courses via some kind of script they wrote. But, again, I'm not sure if this is even a "thing" or not.

There are two third-party products I'm aware of (both of which have a cost associated with them). The first is from Cidi Labs, and it is called TidyUP. The second is from Simple Higher Ed (formerly Simple Syllabus), and it is called Clean Up. Both integrate with Canvas. I've used both, and they have some similarities, though the interfaces are different. If you are a Canvas admin for your school, you'd want to reach out to Cidi Labs and/or Simple Higher Ed to set up a time to get a demo of their products and discuss pricing.

I hope this helps in some way.

Shar

Hi @jamin_hoffman ,

And yeah TidyUp! is a blessing if you have CidiLabs, but I did not have it in that Canvas instance.
Cheers - Shar ⭐

tonytoon

https://community.instructure.com/en/discussion/comment/1259542#Comment_1259542

This is similar to the approach we ended up taking. We made sure to keep the original versions of the master courses around and did have to fix a fair number of link issues afterwards because it turned out things we thought were "canvas" links were direct links, and ended up breaking in the process but the overall time savings was still worth it.

JeffreyMeyers

Canvas doesn't do much deduplication, but it does do some.

It overwrites an existing item when you import it again from the same course. If you import the same thing from a different course, you end up with a duplicate.

If you upload a file with the same name in the files area, it will ask you if you want to replace the existing file. If you upload it in the Rich Content Editor, you'll get a duplicate copy.

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