[ARCHIVED] Canvas Commons Importing

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lbarratt1
Community Participant

Does importing a course from Commons wipe out all content in an existing course? I've had various results with this.

If so, how should updates from the "master" to child be handled?

Thank you kindly.

Leona


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kblack
Community Champion

I believe you are onto something, ericwerth‌, as I just ran into this yesterday.  A faculty member reported that content was overwritten after she imported something into her class from Commons that she said she had imported into that class before.  And that's the issue.  Even though this is not specifically pointed out in the Commons Guides, this IS pointed out here:  How do I copy content from another Canvas course? specifically in the blue area at the top:

Importing a course more than once may have unintended consequences. If you import content into a new course, edit the content in the new course, and later import the previous content again, the imported content will override the existing content.

So, I think it's safe to say that material imported from Commons will behave the same way.  You import something once?  No problem.  A second time?  Problem.  And somewhere in the Community (and now I can't find it, of course...) I also saw mentioned that it does not even matter if you renamed something, it will still overwrite it, courtesy of the fact that each item has its own unique ID number behind the scenes.

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