FAST & EASY Way to Copy Content on the FLY

[clong]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For details, please read through the Canvas Release Notes (2020-01-18) and Canvas Release: Direct Share‌

A couple of years ago in a community far, far away...

I submitted a feature idea to Copy content into multiple courses at once. This feature was marked as completed with the 2016 May update made to Canvas Commons and it does accomplish what was asked for, but we want something more awesome than that.

During the time it took to vote on the idea and fully implement it, we had lots of great use cases and sub-ideas that kind of got lost in translation. It turns out that a lot of Canvas users create course assignments, announcements, discussions, quizzes on the fly and they want a FAST & EASY way to send all that to multiple courses all at once. To do this using the current commons workflow it takes 23 clicks, 2 text entry fields, an image selection and some waiting. And then you still have to go back and adjust your assignment groups and due dates!

Teachers from K-landia to Academia would all love it if this could be accomplished with less than 3 clicks and take no longer than 1 second. Here's how one popular system does this.

Let's up the Awesome and FLY!

Reference: Copy an Assignment , Copy a Discussion , Copying assignments from one class to another without using the commons.

Comments in completed feature idea: Copy to multiple courses

[clong]

Yes, teachers like the duplicate feature. 😃

They really want to be able to create an assignment in a course and check off other active courses they are teaching so that when they hit save and publish it could be created in 3 different courses all at once.

[Renee_Carney]

oh yes, Have they checked out https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-11513-canvas-release-blueprint-courses?sr=search&searchId=3...‌, then.  That is a use case that blueprint was designed to address!

[clong]

Blueprint solves a different problem. How does the workflow for that compare to this? 

[Renee_Carney]

The workflow is different, but similar concept.  

I agree, that workflow is pretty sweet as well.

[clong]

So I had a teacher today who teaches 3 different courses. They are similar but they do not do the same activities and assignments all the time.

Today, she made an assignment in her health class and wanted to use that same assignment in her Hybrid Health class and LEP Health class. I'm not sure how Blueprint helps to do this?? I know she could save the assignment to commons and then import into the other 2 courses at once, but as you know that is an undertaking. I know she could also copy using import from another Canvas course. Not ideal either...

Could you please make a quick little video to demo how Blueprint can help with this use case?  

[angieclifford]

We are new to Canvas, like less than a month, and this is already one of the most requested items to easily be able to copy an announcement, discussion board, or assignment from one course to another.  As stated, doing it via import course content takes longer than just re-creating something simple and doing it via commons also takes too long as you have to wait for the resource to be published to commons, then you have to wait for it to import into the course before you can do anything with it.  It just seems like this should be doable and should be easy for instructors to use to save them time when courses have similar content.

[clong]

 @Renee_Carney ‌ any suggestions on how to use blueprint courses to do this?

[Renee_Carney]

 @clong ‌

I'll have to admit that I have not played with it nearly enough to advise you, but  @kblack ‌ wrote an excellent resource https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/higher-ed/blog/2017/08/05/designing-maintaining-and-perhaps-r...‌ and may be able to provide some personal tips as well!

[dtheriault]

Please listen to Chris on this. 

[dtheriault]

PLEASE!