[ARCHIVED] Combine several courses into a single course shell

[lmsguy]

Does Canvas support the following scenario? If so, how?

• Bring the content of half a dozen courses into a single course shell, while maintaining the structural integrity of each course.
• Display all courses on a single Modules page, with the multi-module content for each course being collapsible and expandable when you click on the heading for that course. (So both the Course headings and the Module headings will be collapsible.)
• Lock down each course so that it cannot be accessed until a specific date.

Thanks for any help!

[jherron]

lmsguy ,

Not sure if this is exactly what you're meaning, but I remember that in Canvas sample course templates, there's a template called "One Program: Multiple Short Courses" -- third down in the list at Sample Course Templates. You're able to download the template, and it looks like courses are set up pretty much as modules with availability/requirement settings. You could just import all of the course material into a single shell and disperse among modules if I'm understanding it correctly. Hope it might help!

Josh

[ianjohnston]

Some questions,

Do you primarily uses pages or modules to organize a course (IE do you have a home page that links to the different components of the course or do you have students access these components through modules)?

Are the courses you are trying to merge contained in one module or multiple / have single page start point.

Finally, what is your end goal for merging all of these courses into this shell?

For locking down the whole course shell.

If you are just trying to limit student access you can use the start and end date setting and check the restrict students form viewing course before start date.

If you are trying to limit all user access you can do this through terms.

If you are just trying to limit access to the individual courses within this shell if each course is contained in its own module you can use the lock until setting for that module. However I believe that this only limits student access.

[siglinde]

Hello,

to me, the shell solution would be helpful if the course size limit does not apply to the shell then - but I don't think this is what you are telling...

I recently have been given following advice from the Canvas team (when asking how I could apply for a larger storage space) :

Unfortunately there isn't a way to increase the storage size of your free teaching account. One way people have been able to get around is to have multiple free teaching accounts. Is that something you think you will be able to do?

So, if I understand right, I shall consider opening several FFT accounts, create courses inside these accounts... and there would than be a way to gather them inside a course shell hosted at another dedicated FFT account?! Strange... Actually I doubt that we could "cheat" the storage space like this. However, something seems to be strange with copying anyway:

Any (better?) suggestion on what to do when people are not a university or school that could subscribe to a Canvas plan? Is there no other way than to work with several (!!) "free-for-teachers" accounts with 250Mo size limit? (I should probably explain why the size is really limiting us: I am using Canvas for Deaf teachers and learners, with a main part of the interactions and the course materials, instructions, quizezs, etc. provided in sign language videos. And not all of them can be embedded from elsewhere, especially for sign language responses in the quizzes etc. - otherwise I could have been continuing working with Moodle as well)

Looking forward to any reply - merci 🙂

[kona]

siglinde​, I would agree that the work around suggested wouldn't really work.

Could some of the video be housed somewhere like GoogleDrive or Dropbox and linked to your course via URL?

Back to your original question, was there a reason you wanted multiple different courses together in one course? Are the students the same and are progressing from one course to the next? Regardless, if you go with the template recommended by Joshua, yes, you could lock down the content and make it so students couldn't access it until a certain date - How do I lock a Module?

[siglinde]

hello Kona and merci for your reply.

As I wrote in my previous post, I am already hosting as much videos as possible outside (on youtube mainly), but this is not always possible (for example in possible quiz answers the embedding of external videos does not work and switching to another tab to see each video increases error rates and makes the whole process much longer). Moreover a lot of video materials is added during the course by the students themselves and the idea to switch to Canvas was actually to be able to make use of the included video recorder tool instead of having the students lose a lot of time and energy in recording externally, uploading to a separate platform and paste a link...

The original question was from lmsguy​, so she has to answer. (The only advantage I could see for me in gathering several courses in one shell is, as I said above, if the storage was counted separately...)

[ianjohnston]

siglinde​ I am wondering if you might want to post this dilemma (running out of space with a video heavy course on a free Canvas account) as a separate question as this track seems to be a bit tangential to lmsguy​'s original question. In addition while the combining of classes may be a solution, their may be a better one out there that someone has discovered.

[siglinde]

thanks for the advice, Ian 🙂

et voilà : storage problem: running out of space with a video heavy course on a free Canvas account

[cwendt]

I think you could do it, but it might take a little bit of work. I am in agreement with what Josh said, provided you don't run out of space. Here's what *could* work for you, if I am understanding you correctly:

Give a consistent "tag" on the front end to each page or module of your course (2A, PS101, etc.).

In settings, import contents, then copy a Canvas course. Import all content. Do this with each class you want to bundle into the new one.

In the new course (in case they don't come through in the order you want), you'll have the "2A" or whatever in front to tell you which page/module is from which and you can then reorder them.

Unpublish what you don't want them to access yet.

[ttruong]

For combining several courses into a single course shell, we used the differentiated assignments to keep everyone on track.  There is an ongoing vote for Differentiated Pages that will greatly help with this.  If there is a lot of overlap in the content, we built them into pages and tailored the assignments more specifically for the different courses.  We also made it very clear on a welcome page of the very clear paths that need to be taken.  Any additional material that was not needed for different members of a course would be supplemental information for them.

Therefore, if you were in the intermediate course, you would see about 7 assignments, while the advanced course would see 10 assignments.

[scottdennis]

I'd be curious to learn more about the use case that lmsguy​ is working to address.