Multiple Blueprints in a Single Course

[michelle_steven]

I would like to have the ability to allow multiple blueprint courses in one course. We have a series of courses where there's one of 3 core sections, which are made up of multiple modules and assessments, and then a specialty (17 different specialties) is added on. These courses will be republished as a new set of courses annually. It would be very helpful to be able to pull two blueprint courses into these rather than having to update each one.

My idea of how this would work is that you would unlock/lock down the portions of the course depending on which blueprint is being synced.

While we'd be using this with extension‌ catalog‌ courses, I can see how this would be very beneficial to many institutions and training developers.

[jcrawford]

I'm seeing a need for this and mentioned it to quite a few people at InstructureCon.  I would love to be able to create an overall "High School Blueprint" or "Elementary Blueprint" and then be able to connect specific course blueprints (Ex. English 1 blueprint with the syllabus, standards, common assessments, etc.) or specific school blueprints.  

Thanks for getting this idea up and going! 

[bwalters1]

I agree! I'd like to be able to cascade blueprints based on subaccount parentage. I think this would allow us to manage institution templates, then have course level content that is associated to units for a semester. 

[bwalters1]

 @marcus_derijk ‌ This might be of interest to you too?

[marcus_derijk]

Absolutely, particularly the cascading blueprints. Thanks  @bwalters1 ‌.

Sharing this to https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/apac?sr=search&searchId=d2508eb6-27fe-4124-baeb-4d1afeaba148&...‌ as well.

[michelle_steven]

Yes, please do share! I know it would be extremely helpful for our institution. Thanks!

[stuart_ryan]

Thanks for the share  @marcus_derijk , a great find (and one I would definitely love to see as well)!

[michelle_steven]

As I've looked into Blueprint some more, I also wish I didn't have to select whole sections "all assignments, all quizzes, all content pages" and could select just certain pages.

[arovner]

So far we have been using Blueprint to enable our instructors who teach multiple sections of the same class to manage their content with it.  (They used to cross-list but we stopped once the FERPA issue was brought up).  However, we had to give up our eLearning dream of using Blueprint to load a full Start Here module into all of our courses (faculty would still be able to edit, delete it, etc.).  Having the ability to do both would be amazing and would better serve our students!

Thank you for considering!

Amy

[cms_hickss]

I like this idea because there are times when various courses might need the same "guidelines for writing" for example and that file/module might be maintained by the Library. AND, those same courses may be using content required by their individual departments.

The only issue I can see with allowing multiple blueprints would be if the files, modules, assignments or quizzes happen to have the same name (like schedule or module one). Will one blueprint try to overwrite the other, will it know to name them the same and then the teacher will need to update, etc.

[gouldt]

I liked this idea because we have some items in a Get Started module that being able to blue print would allow us to update universally. We use master courses at our College. I had a couple of master courses in the process of being updated when the semester began. We decided to create Blue Print courses and have the developer update as the semester was going. We did this on a very small scale, only two sections per Blue Print course. It was great to have a way to update multiple sections easily. The only downside was that we had problems with updating quizzes. We eventually had to update them in the sections manually, because the new questions wouldn't sync. It would be nice to be able to have basically Blue Print modules that we could sync to all courses. Even better would be to have the ability to do this by semester. So that we could just sync to all of the live courses in the current semester.

[sendres]

We offer some courses that co-sit regular students with honors students with differentiated assignments for each group. We might roll dozens of sections for regular students only plus one or two for combined regular and honors students. Managing the content for this has been a pain; we maintain separate masters for regular and honors content. When we need a co-sit section, we have to copy the regular shell, import the honors content, and then manually go through every assignment to switch it from being assigned to everyone to being assigned to only the regular or honors students. With multiple blueprints, we could use one for each type of content and merge them together whenever we need a co-sit course.

[dwillmore]

I am with the others.  I would like to push content from the main account to all courses in a term and then allow sub-accounts to push their content to their courses.

I would also like to sort the courses that are already sync'd by term and or name to remove them from the sync list.   I do this to get around the limitation of only one blueprint course allowed.

[tmoberlin]

This would be a big bonus for us if it were implemented. We have courses that need to be differentiated for various student populations. Additionally, we have standard content that's implemented in all courses within a subject area and/or the school. In both scenarios, having the ability to push updates from 3-5 blueprints to a single course would significantly cut down on maintenance for our team.

[udelhsar]

This would be wonderful!  I agree with the above comments to be able to have cascading blueprints would be great.  Would also have to work with a hierarchy of what would lock what.  For example could a department level blueprint override a college level blueprint.  

We use sub-accounts in our instance,  would be helpful even to say that there could be blueprints again with a hierarchy by account/sub-account.  

Thank you for pushing this to vote. 

[gharbor]

Even if it was a hierarchy of blueprint masters so that you could make a whole school bluprint master and then the child courses themselves could ALSO be bluprint masters of sub-schools.

All this would require is for a course which is currently a "BluePrint Child" to still have the ability to be a BluePrint parent of courses in it's sub-account.

This way you can have a very basic "whole school" blueprint and progressively more detailed child blueprints.

[debbie_ellis]

Grant,

One of our users would like something similar, I think, to what you are suggesting. He is in charge of creating online courses, so he would like a master blueprint that contains information that would go out to all course blueprints, then the course blueprints would have the content added, and then be pushed out to an actual course section. But, since a blueprint can't be descended to another blueprint, he can't do what he wants.

[angie_jebulan]

This feature will be a great help for our institution especially in deploying general content for our courses. Hope that either this or the cascading option will be available soon. 

[jason_cummings]

This would be an important new feature for our organization. The ability to sync (and correct, update, sync again) our student orientation from an institution wide blueprint into individual course blueprints (which are associated w/ our student-facing classes)....would be a really, really exciting improvement.

[ProductPanda]

Comments from Instructure

As part of the new Ideas & Themes process, all ideas in Idea Conversations were reviewed by the Product Team. Any Idea that was associated with an identified theme was moved to the new Idea & Themes space. Any Idea that was not part of the move is being marked as Archived. This will preserve the history of the conversations while also letting Community members know that Instructure will not explore the request at this time.