How do you share a course with several teachers teaching different sections?

[noates]

We Are just getting started and I have imported courses, sections, teachers, and students. My problem is there is one course with many sections and teachers in it.  How does each teacher set up their own course and materials without messing up another teacher's course content?

[kona]

 @noates ​, truthfully, not that well. Having multiple teachers in the same course almost always leads to people messing up other people's stuff (not purposely) and there isn't a way around it. We have a number of team taught classes and have this problem a lot - with people accidentally deleting other Instructors content/assignments and/or changing due dates. Yes, we do have some courses like this, but we try to avoid it as much as possible because of these issues. In general my suggestion is to let each Instructor have their own course.

Question: Are all students in the course enrolled in all sections that are being taught in the course? I only ask because if each student is only taking one section/Instructor than this is going to probably get pretty confusing for the student and add an extra layer of work onto the Instructor (who would need to make sure students from their section ONLY saw their assignments and content).

[QC99_tsilvius]

Hello  @noates ​. We have teachers who have experienced why too many cooks in the Canvas kitchen can be problematic. Just like  @kona ​ mentions, they have felt the pangs of "oops, did I just delete that?" to "who's grading which kids?" yet they still would like to design together sequentially and share resources. The advice I have offered them is using a pyramid scheme  🙂 By creating an additional "teacher-only clubhouse" Canvas class at the top of this pyramid model teachers are free to share, create, tweak module structure, and collaborate on question banks that feed to formative and summative assessments all in the same class. When the collaborators are satisfied with the way things look they each can "reach up" from their own Canvas classes (the ones with students enrolled) and grab a copy using the Import feature, or they can also use Commons to share their content out and beyond their team to others, too.

Is it foolproof? Nope.
Sure, content still can be accidentally deleted, but by teachers working in a separate course from their students to co-develop content there is less of a chance of accidentally causing student confusion if something does get deleted. Should content get deleted accidentally it can be either recreated by the team or restored by typing  /undelete  after the course number in the class URL. Many teachers in our K-12 school district have been using this model successfully. Share back if you're using it or have a different spin on the idea, too! 

[Chris_Hofer]

QC99.tsilvius​...

Your model (I like your "teacher-only clubhouse" terminology, BTW) sounds very similar to what we do at our Technical College.  We have a term called "Master Term" where we enroll our faculty in courses.  For example, in the Accounting program, we would enroll all accounting instructors in our "Accounting 1" or "Payroll Accounting" courses in the "Master Term".  One (maybe two) staff member is usually assigned as the person responsible for keeping the content in the "master" up-to-date in Canvas (we assign them the "Teacher" role).  Everyone else who has access to a course "master" is assigned our custom "Viewer" role.  (This is a role based off of the "Teacher" role type.)  This role allows our instructors to view the content in the "master" course but not make any changes to it.  They can still log into their own course(s) with students and import the content from the "master" course.  If we have requests for instructors to get access to the course "master" (so they are able to edit content or import content), we are able to do this simply by sending an invite to the "master" course.  We haven't utilized Commons to import content for an entire course, and that would be something we'd need to explore.  But so far, the model we've used has worked in Canvas (and in our previous LMS, Pearson eCollege's LearningStudio).

[QC99_tsilvius]

I like the sound of this system Viewer role,  @Chris_Hofer ​. It sounds like a great idea and gives teachers the opportunity to preview without being able to edit the content as well as grab copies of what they feel they need into their own course. We have a mastercourse model for the cyber program component of our school district. We don't have a way for teachers to preview it even though it is content aligned what is taught in our F2F courses to make the student transfer from F2F-to-Cyber (and vice versa) smoother. Once we import the mastercourse into their SIS-generated Canvas Cyber course teachers are free to edit, augment, add assessment choices, etc as they move in to the course.  The pyramid scheme I mentioned above to  @noates ​ is more for creating a shared space for teachers looking for, essentially, a sandbox course they can share, prep content and pretty much if/when they're done building together and importing into their respective courses, can toss out. Thanks for sharing how you're using the Viewer role.

[noates]

Thank you everyone for responding to my question. I have a lot to think about now!

Kona, I will give you an example of how it is set up right now. We have very few teachers using it so far. We have a course called Diversified Occupations and 5 different sections with different students and one teacher teaches 3 of those sections and one teacher teaches the other 2 sections.

I thought about creating a course for each section but that won’t work for us because we have state course codes.

QC99.tsilvius – Thank you for the diagram. Do you let your teachers create the Master course and then import the other course with the sections or students from your SIS? Also, how do you mark assignments for only your students to see? Would you create groups?

Todd – Thank you for explaining further on the “teacher-only clubhouse” and how you set that up with 1 teacher owning the course and the other teachers as viewers.

I’m not sure how to mark “Like” on the actual post I started but thank you all for your help!

Nancy

[Stef_retired]

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