It was a long time before we started even considering Blueprints on Canvas for our courses, and although we haven’t started using them on our Core or Elective teaching courses, we have found a use for Blueprints working with our Careers Centre.
With around 90% of the information within our Careers Centres being identical and only a few bespoke pages relating to each specific cohort of students, this was the perfect use case to trial using Blueprints for the first time.
The added benefit of Blueprints being that the Careers Centre only needed to update information in one area with canvas pushing the updates down into the associated child courses using the Sync function within the Blueprint. (if this wasn’t bespoke information related to the cohort)
After the new Careers Blueprint course that housed the 90% of information was developed, it was agreed that after enabling the course as a blueprint that the only Objects we wanted to lock were the Page contents with the information, leaving everything else set with no attributes locked.
Course Homepage
The Homepage for each child course was different, and you may be wondering how we did this. It’s not as complicated as you may think!
We did have a Homepage template on the blueprint course that all cohorts could use, it was as simple as duplicating the Blueprint homepage within the Child course and setting the duplicate as the front page. The now new duplicated home page is no longer associated with the blueprint, which in turn means that this can be edited by an Admin of the child course to suite their cohort of students with the required information without the page being locked, still retaining the Blueprinted page links where needed.
Bespoke pages
Bespoke pages can still be added into a child course of a Blueprint and this is what we have done with the remaining 10% of content that is specific to the cohort… but you might also being wondering what happens when next years child course is set up and linked to the Blueprint, because these bespoke pages wont be pushed through to the new version.
For this, and with there only being two to three pages that are unique to a specific child course, we simply used the Copy to function within the previous year’s child course to send the pages over into the new version of the same Program areas Career Centre Course and respective module. We just need to remember to relink these pages from the new Front page not associated with the blueprint course!
