Any solutions on multiple users working through Commons?

[eric_orton]

We have some Math courses that share content, so in order to make maintenance easier, our plan has been to put the shared content in a private consortium on Commons and then pull it into each course in which it is used. That way, updates could be made in one place, pushed into Commons, and then updated from there in all courses where the content appears.

We also have multiple student employees (who, because they are student employees, come and go with some regularity) helping with the building of the content and courses.

We've discovered that whatever account originally posts an asset to Commons must be used to update that asset on Commons. A different account with editing permissions on the asset can update it, but if they try to share it to Commons, it creates a new copy instead of updating the existing one. Similarly, only the account used to pull an asset from Commons into a course can pull it again if the asset is updated. This is a problem for us because of the aforementioned transiency of student employees.

The only idea we've come up with so far is to create a shared user account that all employees working on these courses used to to any work with Commons. Have any of you encountered this issue? Have you found a better solution?

[victoria-maloy]

Hi Eric,

I don't have much to add except for I've heard the same issue here when using Commons. 

Since it sounds like you are only sharing content internally to your institution, you may want to investigate blueprint courses‌ to push content to your course sites.  Multiple instructors (i.e. student employees) can be in the Blueprint Source Course to build and push content to associated course sites.  (See also my idea: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/8980-blueprint-courses-improve-the-synch-history )

Vicky

[eric_orton]

Thanks for the reply, Vicky. It looks like you are working in my old stomping grounds. I was an instructional designer at the University of Iowa from 2002-2007.

I've looked at Blueprint courses, and there are things I hope to use them for, but for this particular use case they won't do what I need. I've got courses with overlapping content, and the overlap is what I am trying to use Commons to maintain. Without Commons, the two Blueprints would still need their own copies of the overlapping content.