Blueprint courses-- Ability for Teacher Control?

[winnie_milner]

As a district Canvas admin, is there any way for me to give teachers the ability to make a course a blueprint course from one of the manually created courses that they are already able to generate? I went in my admin settings> permissions> account roles> and then enabled "Blueprint courses- add/ edit/associate/delete" for the teacher role.  (I know this still has the red X, but I disabled it again since my test obviously failed. More on that to come...)

So when I went back to test this newly enabled teacher permission, I impersonated one of my teachers. I had them create a new course. Then when I went into that course's settings, the blueprint functionality that the Canvas admin sees, was not there. This was the what it looked like for the teacher. It simply said no-- it wasn't a blueprint course even though I had previously enabled the permission as stated above in this post. 

I understand based on a previous press release that blueprint courses were originally supposed to be for admins and course designers only. There was no mention of teachers in the release. So my question is two-fold.

• Can teachers make manually created Canvas courses (without enrolled students of course) into blueprint courses?
• Is there a reason why they should not have control over this blueprint functionality? 

I really like my teachers to have the least restrictive Canvas creation environment, and granting them this seems to be a no brainer. Am I missing something? I plan on also entering this as a ticket to my CSM, but I thought I would reach out here as well. If I hear something good, I will share it with the group. TIA. 

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello there, @winnie_milner ...

We are also starting to look closely at Blueprint courses.  I think I see a few issues going on with your setup...based on the screenshots that you have shared.

• It looks like you created a custom role in the "Account Roles" tab of your "Permissions" page called "Teachers".  But, the permissions that teachers at your school have (or don't have) are configured in the "Course Roles" tab.  So, it seems like you are creating an admin role called "Teachers" (probably with many things turned off...expect for Blueprints???).  Is this correct?
• At the same account level where you are configuring these permissions, go to your account "Settings" page, and then click on the "Admins" tab.  Do you have any people listed under the heading "Account Admins"?  This is where you would assign someone with that "Teachers" custom account level role that you created ... which would include the Blueprint permission(s) that you enabled.  You are essentially giving that person permissions for that entire account (or sub-account) for Blueprints.
• We've found that, once you have made someone an account admin, and then change a permission on the "Account Roles" tab of the "Permissions" page... you actually have to go back to the "Settings" >> "Admins" tab and temporarily remove that person from the role and then re-add that person once the permissions have been changed.  I'm not sure why the permissions don't just apply to people who are already assigned in the "Admins" tab, but it doesn't seem to do that...so we have to remove their admin role and then re-add them again.  A bit tedious, IMHO.
• If you are going to assign people to the "Teachers" account-level role for Blueprints, my guess is that there may be other settings for that "Teachers" role that you'll want to enable/disable so that they don't have full admin access to the back-end of Canvas.

I'm not sure if any of the above will help or not, but wanted to share some of this information with you.  Let Community members know if you have any questions about this...thanks!  Take care, be well.