Lock Portion of Page in Blueprints

[scaroj]

When working with Blueprints is it possible to lock some content on a page while leaving part of the page content unlocked?

[James · Accepted solution]

 @scaroj  

Several people have expressed an interest in something like this -- letting faculty edit their contact information but not the rest of the information on a page, but it is not currently possible. Locking is done at the page level.

[scaroj]

Thanks for your quick response!  We would like to do more than just contact info for portions of pages. We would like to put in Learning Targets  and Essential Question in a page that cannot be changed by instructors, but would like them to edit the other content students need like slideshows or docs or links to Modules etc.   Is there a way I can request having this looked into?

[James]

You can make a feature request. Start with How does the feature idea process work in the Canvas Community?  

If I had to put on my prognosticator hat, this won't happen -- at least not any time soon. It isn't a change to blueprint courses as much as a change to the way the Rich Content Editor works. It would have to support templates and make part of the page editable but not other parts. Currently, the entire page is combined and people can view the HTML so they can change anything that you have on the page.

My recommendation is that you need to learn to trust your faculty. That happens with education about how to edit appropriately and the importance of leaving things the way they are. Many schools use templates successfully even without blueprint courses.

The other thing you can do is to get into a battle with the faculty and see who tires first. Through the Canvas API, you can fetch the contents of a page or assignment and scan it for what should be in there. If it's not in there, then you could replace the bad content with the desired content and then send it back into Canvas. This can all be done through scripting so it can run once a week (or once a day or once every five minutes). Eventually, the instructor will give up trying to change it.

With Canvas Live Events, I believe you can set up a queue to be notified whenever content changes, so you could set it up to run whenever the instructor changes the page.

Of course, you would need to be careful to make sure that you didn't destroy the content of the page because of a programming error

Getting faculty to work on the same side as you is a lot more productive than trying to fight with them over something.

Another possibility is to break things up and have one page for content that doesn't change (locked in the blueprint master course) and one page that the instructor can customize. I realize that's not ideal, I just mention it as a possibility.

[scaroj]

Thanks again for the quick response!  I definitely get your perspective, is it possible to write into part the HTML code not to be easily deleted in the Rich Content Editor by just highlighting and hitting Delete?  I am quite sure not many people would actually go into the HTML code, find the portion of the content in the code and delete it there, but it is so easy to do in the Rich Content Editor?  

[James]

The content in the RCE is designed to be human friendly, not computer friendly. Comments are stripped out. We have discovered that data attributes are not, so if you're looking for something to automate the process, your template could contain those.

A better way is normally to create a template and specify what should be changed by the instructor. You have a heading and then under it have bullet points that contain instructions for what the instructor should do.  Here's a quick example:

Resources

• Change this to a list of your class resources

What you cannot do is put in instructions to "do not edit this part" as that would show to the students.

I feel compelled to issue a warning about blueprint courses where you allow faculty to change the material. Get your master course ready before you push it through to the associated courses. Editing the page on both ends is going to cause a loss of data for someone. If the object is unlocked and you change the master, then the changes will not be pushed through to the associated course if they have been modified and so your changes to the master are lost (at the teaching course level). If you think "Hey, this is really important, I'll lock the master to make sure it gets pushed out" then it will wipe out any of the instructor's individual revisions.

As long as you understand what's going to happen, things can be done well. Canvas didn't design it to allow some content to change and others to remain fixed.

[richardsonji]

We have used a blueprint for block classes. There are dates on the pages to add to the students' to-do list. For the blueprint we have locked the content on pages. Is there a way we can adjust the dates for the pages in the second block?

[jay_fermaglich]

How do you lock just a single page in a course? I can only get to a "lock all pages" level of specificity.  Or "lock all content."