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]

So I looked a Ken's resource and I've enabled blueprint courses and it's not that I haven't tried or don't believe you when you say it was designed to do what I requested, I just would like a little help figuring this out.  Would really, really appreciate a short 30 second video showing how to do this.

[Renee_Carney]

 @clong ‌ 
Let me know if this one helps -  

[kblack]

Sorry,  @clong ‌ - I just now happened to spot this despite Renee's tagging me earlier!  Blueprint courses should definitely work to push out just about anything to multiple courses simultaneously, taking into account a few of the caveats there are in that document.  I admittedly have not had a lot of use of Blueprint courses on my campus yet, despite many promises to "get back to me on that," but I'd be happy to try something out as an experiment if you needed another pair of eyes looking at something. 

I think it's arguably one of the coolest things Canvas has ever done.

[clong]

Thanks the video helped me conceptualize how this might work. Thinking through this here is how I would go about getting this to work for a way to help teachers create an assignment in one course and quickly send it into let's say 3 other courses.

1. Enable Blueprint feature
2. Create a Blueprint Shell Course for the teacher
3. Make the 3 active courses the teacher is teaching a child of the Blueprint course I created above in Step 2
4. Teach the Teacher how to make an assignment in the BluePrint Shell Course then synch it over to their other 2 courses.
5. Orphan the Blueprint children courses at the end of the semester
6. The original Shell Blueprint courses will need to adopt new children courses for the new semester.

So I'll give this a go with one lucky teacher, theoretically it should work. It's not really what I meant by Fast & Easy Way to Copy Content on the fly. As a teacher can't do this without significant support from their admin and they have to use a Shell course to do it. So is this something Canvas is still planning on doing in a future release?

I'll report back on how this goes.

[ewrye]

While I can see that Blueprints definitely has a use case scenario - this is not the simple intuitive "copy to" interface that teachers are looking for.  The Google Classroom Video Chris added here really explains how simple this can and should be.  Canvas already has the ability to "import" pages when inside a course.  What teachers want to an easy option to "send" a created page/quiz/assignment into multiple courses.  

The feature requested (and as the Google Classroom demo shows) allows for doing this on the fly, in the moment and deciding at that time which course or courses to send it to.  Blueprints does not address this issue.  Blueprints not only requires an association but also sends/syncs a new page/assignment/quiz to every course associated.

I think the best way to look at this is side-to-side versus top-down.  Blueprint is top-down.  It's great if you are the head of a science dept and you want to create a biology template with specific quizzes, pages, rules, etc and you associate this blueprint with every teacher's biology course so they automatically get this content in their courses and can then add to it as they will.  But what we are looking for here is not that - we're looking for a side-to-side.  I am a teacher - I have a course.  I have many other courses.  I create something for one course that I realize I can use in 2 of my other courses - I want a way to simply select those other courses and have that page save in my current course and automatically copy over into the other two courses.  Maybe after that I create a page I want in those 2 courses but also in 2 other courses - I want to use that same method to automatically copy the page into all 4 courses.  (Blueprint doesn't allow this - you can't dynamically choose different courses for the content to sync to.)

I believe the backbone to do this is there.  You can already export portions of a course and then import them into another course.  Or using Cidilabs design tools you can copy the URL to a course page and then import that into a page in another course.  I can't imagine it wouldn't be possibly programmatically to do what Chris has requested - it should actually be much easier to program than the Blueprint feature, but way more useful for teachers I think.

[clong]

[dtheriault]

[don_bryn]

I spent a weekend adding a function to  @James  date-manager spreadsheet, which does what many of us have requested from Canvas before.  And I'm not a coder!  Johanna Hardner is working on more functions as well.     This should be much easier to program than Canvas developers lead us to think, especially because–like you said–the underlying backbone is there.

I think it's more a matter of priorities and maybe manpower to get things done?

[clong]

Sounds good!! I would love to see what you have, do you have a version of it you can share?

[don_bryn]

Sorry, I was trying to not horn in, but the blog post with access to the google doc is here:  Canvas Bulk Date Editor (Google Sheet)