Can I merge multiple courses via an SIS upload?

[cbirdsong]

I receive a LOT of requests from faculty to merge their like-courses in Canvas, which isn't a big deal in itself. However, we are now coming across more & more issues the divisions having to cancel & merge courses on their end the week before the semester starts due to low enrollments, so it creates a mess with any affected courses I've already merged. My solution would be to create an ongoing list of merge requests, but wait to upload it until the divisions have had a chance to make their modifications, and then upload one file over the weekend. My alternative is to manually merge them over that weekend, but that could take hours, and so if there's a way to just upload an SIS file, that would save me a lot of time. From what I can tell, I may have to do a combination of a courses upload and a sections upload, however I'm not sure what field titles correspond to our own fields in the SIS files. Any suggestions or help is appreciated!

[chriscas]

Hi @cbirdsong ,

There are probably a few ways you could tackle this, but a lot is going to depend on how your SIS communicates with Canvas.  If your SIS sends complete course/section/enrollment info on an automated schedule, you'll definitely want to look into crosslisting.  If your SIS only sends changes, you could potentially use course/section files as you mentioned.

In my opinion, crosslisting is probably the easiest (and perhaps most correct) way to handle this.  You can look at the xlists.csv section of https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/file.sis_csv.html to see the formatting.  You will either need to make one of the current course shells the "home" for corsslisting the other sections into, or you'll need to create new course shells (courses.csv) and then crosslist all the appropriate sections into those.

Hope this helps give you a start at least.  Definitely post back if you have questions!

-Chris