Copy an Assignment

[jthoms]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

  Idea will be open for vote Wed. July 1, 2015 - Wed. October 7, 2015  Learn more about voting...

A good instructional design practice is to have a predictable module structure for students to follow throughout a course. Assignments often have consistent options and text (ie: honor code statements) throughout a course.

Currently copying requires creating a new assignment, and copying content for each item. By adding a “copy” option to the options gear, the effort to build a course will be greatly reduced. If this triggered a dialogue to state how many copies to make, it would be very simple to quickly build out a course structure.

Please help to flesh out this idea by discussing your particular use case in the comments.

Edit: taking quizzes out of this request -- please vote and comment at Duplicate Quizzes

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-07-15) 

[mhenderson]

I'm the admin for our district account and work as an instructional technology coach in our district so am no longer in the classroom.  This idea is mentioned to me by a teacher at least once a week.  Canvas should reopen this one for voting.  I feel like it would be useful to have Copy in the dropdown menu as shown above, then once selected, a little window would appear for you to give your copy a name and a new due date.  All the settings could stay the same otherwise.  That would be perfect!

[pagebd]

It would be great if there was a way to quickly and easily make multiple copies of the same quiz or assignment, perhaps with a setting that it is a "master" copy that students don't actually access.  This "master" copy could serve as the template for other quizzes/assignments whereby the teacher can make changes in the "master" copy and a box could be checked to apply those changes to all copies of the quiz/assignment within that course, even if students have accessed some of the assignments already.  Understandably, the dates would likely need to be set one quiz/assignment at a time, but including an option to make a bulk change to the time due would be a welcome addition as well.

[campbellj]

I am desperate for this feature... My students have a weekly assignment that is identical every week. The copy feature also needs to include rubric support... so the rubric created with an assignment also copies to the subsequent versions. I can't believe such a basic, obvious function isn't included yet.

[kmatson]

Jason where is Canvas with this? We are anxiously awaiting the ability to copy so pestering, sorry.

Thank you,

Karen

[mje]

Agreed, this is a significant feature.

[mpf169]

Agreed. It would be extremely helpful to be able to simply copy an assignment with the click of a button (either within a course or to another course). I have assignments that are due multiple times within the semester. All assignment settings are the same except for title and due date. A copy assignment function would have saved me at least 4 hours so far, and I'm only half done adding assignments.

[Stef_retired]

People who voted for this will probably also like this:

[mabrams]

Background: In every 100-level class that I teach, I require students to submit online summaries on the day's reading assignment before class begins.  This means that I have to set up about 30 assignments per class, every semester.  All of these assignments are identical except for the due date and due time (which is the time that class begins).  In a given class, each summary concerns a different reading, but there's no need for me to specify the reading within the assignment; I communicate that elsewhere.

The problem:  Setting up 30 identical assignments  per class every semester is tedious and error-prone.

It's been suggested to me that I might be able to drag assignments from the calendar of a previous semester's class into the calendar of a new class if I give assignments generic names ("reading summary 1", "reading summary 2", etc.).  However, this is still pretty tedious, and unless I taught the new course in the same time slot as the old course, I'd have to go in and edit all of due times--that's hardly any better.  Also, if I use generic names, that means that if I try to collect all of the reading summary assignments as links on one page, the dates won't be displayed (unless I included the due date in the name of the assignment, in which case I would have to edit the names as well as the due times after dragging the assignments from an old course).

To me this seems like a basic need for a sophisticated LMS.  Although many instructors won't need this capability, I'm surprised that others aren't clamoring for it.  Perhaps I am unusual in creating so many similar assignments, but I suspect that if the capability existed and was not difficult to use, it would get used a lot by some instructors.

A solution: I think that what's needed is one of the following:

(a) A built-in function provided by Canvas that would allow someone to automatically generate a series of similar assignments.  One way to do this would be to allow someone to set up a template assignment, in which certain choices were fixed, but other choices, such as dates and times, could be specified in a list to be applied in sequence to assignments, or as "every wednesday".   You'd also have to be able to specify a list of titles for the assignments to be given to assignments in sequence as they are generated.  Some instructors would no doubt like it if you could also specify a list of descriptions, etc.  This could all be done with a new user interface, but I would suggest taking the existing single-assignment user interface and enhancing it to create the new assignment template interface.

(b) Convenient ability to script new Canvas functions.  Then I could write some code that generated the assignments I want automatically.  (I see here The Canvas LMS Open Source Project on Open Hub  that Canvas is written in Ruby, Coffeescript, and Javascript.  I'm comfortable with the latter and would be happy to learn the other two for this purpose.)  Is this a viable possibility?

[Stef_retired]

 @mabrams , it's certainly tedious to have to copy the same assignment over and over until you have 30 assignments. But from your post, it sounds like you've already done the work for one course. If that's right, once you have the assignments set up in a course, you can leave the original course intact, and copy it over into a new Canvas course shell for the new semester. And if you use the date adjust feature during the course copy process, the due dates in the new course will be where you want them--or they'll be close, depending on how calendar anomalies like breaks and holidays fall in the various semesters. Please refer to How do I copy a Canvas course into a new course shell? , How do I adjust events and due dates in a course import? , and How do I copy content from another Canvas course?​

Also, have you checked out the Canvancements space on GitHub? GitHub - jamesjonesmath/canvancement: Enhancements to the Canvas LMS

[rmiller]

Stefanie,

Like Marshall, I regularly have assignments that duplicate regularly.  Yes, I have created them in other semesters, however that does not prevent me from having to regularly start from scratch.  All it takes is for there to be one change of any type, and every assignment either has to be opened and edited or recreated from scratch.  Something as simple as seeing a more clear way to phrase an instruction to fixing a typo requires working through all of the previously created assignments.

Copy and paste is a standard function in virtually every computer program we use in education.  Please make this function available within a course for all activities of the course.  This includes anything that a student would actually submit, from a quiz to collaboration.

Like Marshall, I have regularly spent many unnecessary hours creating duplicate assignments.  It is also an extremely error prone method of handling materials.

Thanks