[Course Settings] Allow Admin to Set Default Settings for courses

[ebschc]

It would be hugely helpful to district-level Canvas Admins to be able to modify and establish default course settings for course shells created for sections assigned to teacher users.

For example, if a teacher technology advisory committee, school principal, and/or tech department in the school or district determines that all courses published in Canvas for students and observers have settings that differ from the current defaults, then this requires a manual change to each course by the teacher and/or admin depending upon the district's user permissions.

e.g., setting grading schemes, or students rights to view, attach, etc.

e.g., modifying default course navigation menu items to be viewable to students...

I suggest that Canvas develop a feature that would allow an admin to simply set the course settings defaults prior to the creation of courses within subaccounts, manually or via SIS integration.

This feature could be available in one or more of the following locations of the Admin navigation menu:

(a) Courses

(b) Add a New Course

(c) Settings

(d) Subaccounts

[kbickell]

Hi, I would like to have the script as well, thanks.

[KAilsa_Rowan]

Hi, Can this idea be moved to the new "Radar" stage?

[joseph_allen]

 @tdarrow   @millerjm   @kbickell 

Hi folks, sorry this took so long to get back to you.  Here is the process we use to set course defaults:

1. We first run an SQL script to determine which courses meet the criteria we want to change. See attached picture for exact script.  Some  examples: Which courses are showing final grades, which courses are not hiding the distribution graphs, which courses are not disabling responses to announcements, which courses have a start date of 'x'.
2. We then run a Canvas API to change the settings for those courses to the setting we want.  See attached picture for exact script.
3. This script can be run daily, or at the start of a new year.  Multiple versions could be created that run at different times, i.e. some daily, some once a year.  For example, if none of the courses should be on the open internet, you could run the API daily to set visibility to course or institution instead of public.  Another script could run just at the beginning of the year to set initial defaults like, don't allow student discussion topics, but then teachers can choose to change the setting after the course begins and the script doesn't run until the next time.  We use variations like this to manipulate the course settings in various sub accounts as needed. 

[Renee_Carney]

  Idea is currently in Product Radar Learn more about this stage...

[eggersc]

 @joseph_allen  Are you able to set a custom grading scheme as the default for all courses through your script? 

[joseph_allen]

 @eggersc  We don't use grading schemes in our district, but I don't see why you couldn't add that via script.

[garth]

We have implemented a solution to this very issue using the API.

Basic steps we have implemented:

• create a sub-account where our course designers can create "course templates"
• instructors/designers can create a list of courses (usually by sis id) and ask for those courses to be populated from a "course template" in our library
• one of our admins can run a script, which ingests the course list and course id of the template and takes care of the rest

This is very useful when populating large groups of courses.

When your course designers are working on individucal courses and want to "clone" content from an existing course or template, there is already a function in course settings to "Import Content into this Course", which has also been working, but if you are not familiar with this tool you feel a bit blind, as you aren't presented with options until after you click "Import".

I see some mention of setting a default grading scheme, we do that as part of a gradebook "sanity" check.  We have an algorithm to inspect all gradebooks and look for grading errors, including missing grading schemes.  We have a workflow to push grades from Canvas to our SIS, if there is no letter grade (i.e. if no grading scheme is applied) the SIS doesn't like it.  Having a way to force a grading scheme on courses that are missing one would be a nice feature to have : )

[aurnob_bhattach]

This is such a nice requirement and much needed !!

Might solve these issues which we are really hoping for :-

1. Where can teacher see the grading scheme other than course settings and assessment tasks ?

2. The default grading scheme is added at root level BUT when the teacher navigate to course settings to view the grading scheme - it displays "Canvas default gradescheme' which is not the university grading scheme added at the root level.

3. If the default grading scheme is added at root level and teacher also sets it at course settings , then  it should be displayed as default for any assessment task within the assignment. If they want to set a different grading scheme they can create one and select . BUT that is not what's happening- everytime user is displayed with "CANVAS default grade schemes".

4. Teacher is displayed with "canvas grade scheme"  for each assessment even if they set RMIT added grade scheme at course settings.

[joseph_allen]

Just an update to my original post, we did set course defaults this year using the nearly release Blue Print courses and so far it has met all of our expectations.  We set the navigation, the options, the home page and a few other items in the course shells.  Once this is all set, we remove the course association.  

[tr604]

I would add that we need this to apply to the subaccount level (ie allow admins to set navigation for each subaccount or at the account level).   @navarroj ‌  For voting.