Copying an assignment into multiple courses WITHOUT having to upload to the COMMONS and then reload from there?

[cstaude]

How soon will we be able to click and drop assignments into multiple classes? It is tedious and time-consuming to remake an assignment after making it once. 

In my former LMS we could click on multiple sections for the same course and upload the assignment into ALL of them once we were at the PUBLISH step. This seems like it should be a logical tool to have for High school teachers who sometimes have 3 or more sections of the same course running simultaneously!

[kblack · Accepted solution]

Hi  @cstaude  Welcome to the Canvas Community. You are correct that Canvas does not have a direct way of doing this, but there a few things one can do to make your life a little easier:

• You can do a partial import from the first class into the second, by following this guide: How do I select specific content as part of a course import? The key there, of course, is the word "partial," because it would not be good to do a full import!  But even better (in my opinion) is...
• Talk to your local Canvas administrator about setting up a blueprint course for yourself. While some of the material in the online instructor's guide is about teaching a course that is based upon a blueprint (see How do I manage content for a course associated with a blueprint course? and the following pages), I have had a couple of instructors at my own institution have blueprint sites created for them for courses that they, too, are teaching.  In your example, your administrator can create a blueprint master course with you as the instructor, and then associate that blueprint with the 3 courses that you are teaching.  You create the assignment in the blueprint master, and then it's sent over to the 3 other courses after you click a Sync button.  This is covered in the online instructor's guide here: How do I sync course content in a blueprint course as an instructor? You are not mistaken in thinking that this would then mean that you would be in charge of four courses:  the blueprint (master) course site and the 3 actual associated course sites.  But it may be a solution to what you want within Canvas.  While much of the talk about blueprints within this Community are for creating (for example) a departmental or school-wide master course to "push out" to different faculty, it is perfectly appropriate to use blueprints on a smaller scale, as well.

That's what's out there now.  Also, I invite you to vote and comment upon this Feature Idea, which I think describes more what you are after within Canvas:  https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/6078-fast-easy-way-to-copy-content-on-the-fly 

I hope this helps a bit, Claudia.