[Course Import/Export] create restore point for course

[pcorvino]

at my university, we have a faculty lead model. the lead faculty creates the course in canvas and adds the teaching faculty members to the course so they can import the content into their section. once a semester, a teaching faculty member will import their blank course into my fully developed course, resulting in the loss of all of my work! The ability to create a "course restore point" or something like that would be wonderful to have access to so instructors can simply restore a previous version of the course from a restore point. Even easier would be to have people roles that don't allow for importing into the course.

[rcottrel]

I agree that this would be so useful when working with a team. Having the option to restore to a specific version, or even set a "restore to this point" flag would be helpful! I've used the beta and test environments to help with this, and it is sometimes helpful, but if my changes were made recently, then these don't have the most up-to-date information. A "version history" or restore point of the whole course would be useful!

[JamesSekcienski]

I also agree that this would be helpful.  Pages have a version history, but no other course content has an accessible version history.  This would be especially helpful to undo a course import or blueprint sync if something goes wrong or a course accidentally received a sync.

As a side comment, based on the issue you are experiencing, have you considered using blueprints to sync content from the master version to the new courses rather than enrolling the instructors into the master course and having them import the course content themselves?  Rather than enrolling the other teachers, the lead faculty member could be trained to associate the other instructors' sections to the blueprint and sync the content to their courses.  Blueprint Courses Overview - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

Also, if you have access to edit the Canvas Theme for your organization, you could consider adding some custom CSS to hide the buttons to import course content and/or custom JavaScript to remove the buttons and re-direct away from content migration pages (JavaScript could also be set to be role based to allow certain roles to still view the import buttons). Note:  Editing the theme is at your own risk and Canvas won't provide support for issues caused by custom CSS/JavaScript.