Account templates for manually-moved courses

[KeriSalyards]

Hi all! So a little bit of background about the way our system works: Our courses are populated into Canvas by our SIS, but they are all dumped into our main account. Before the beginning of each semester, I manually run a CSV upload to separate those courses into their proper sub-accounts. 

My school has recently decided that they want templates made for each program. I love it, super happy to do it, but how will this work for the way our courses are made in the system? My understanding of course templates is that they are only applied when the course is actually made. If I have to move the courses into their sub-accounts manually after they're made, and each sub-account will have it's own template, will the courses adopt the template when they are moved into the sub-account? Or will I have to apply the templates manually? If I do have to apply them manually, anyone have any suggestions on the best workflow for that?

Fixing the SIS to apply the sub-accounts is already a conversation I've had with IT, and it's a no-go. Too cost-prohibitive. I'd love any advice!

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @KeriSalyards,

In he scenario you're describing, where courses are all created in one account (I'll say Account A) and then you move them to different accounts later (Account B, C, D, etc), the only template that would get applied automatically to the courses would be the template set up for Account A.  If Account B, C, D have their own templates, you'd have to basically do an import of that template course into each course manually (you could perhaps use some scripting/APIs to try to reduce workload if you're familiar with programming).  I don't really know any other alternative methods for doing this...

As you already seem to know, your SIS would ideally put everything in the right place to being with, but you said that's out of the question due to cost right now.  It may be worth having more conversations about that in the future though, as I'm sure doing all of the work manually is going to take you a significant amount of time, and time does equal money too!

-Chris

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @KeriSalyards,

In he scenario you're describing, where courses are all created in one account (I'll say Account A) and then you move them to different accounts later (Account B, C, D, etc), the only template that would get applied automatically to the courses would be the template set up for Account A.  If Account B, C, D have their own templates, you'd have to basically do an import of that template course into each course manually (you could perhaps use some scripting/APIs to try to reduce workload if you're familiar with programming).  I don't really know any other alternative methods for doing this...

As you already seem to know, your SIS would ideally put everything in the right place to being with, but you said that's out of the question due to cost right now.  It may be worth having more conversations about that in the future though, as I'm sure doing all of the work manually is going to take you a significant amount of time, and time does equal money too!

-Chris

[KeriSalyards]

Darn, that's what I feared! Oh well, it is what it is. I do have a little bit of experience with the API, but I've never done anything as complicated as apply a template to all the courses in a specific term and sub account. Any helpful pointers/scripts for that?

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @KeriSalyards,

Sorry for the delayed response!

While scripting this would be possible, I think it's going to get pretty complex.  I know you'd use the content migrations API to set up the actual import of a template course, but I've never used that particular API myself and it looks like one of the more involved ones to call.  Aside from that, you'd need to get a list of courses it iterate through and do thew above import, and that's pretty easy (depending whether you want to do it by term, by subaccount, etc).  The other thing you'd need to do is make sure you don't import your template more than once...  You could try to keep track of something locally with your script, or perhaps list the content migrations that have already been done...

Personally, I use Python for almost all of my API scripts because I found it to handle API stuff pretty easily, but I know there are a lot of other options out there.

Hope this extra info might help a bit more.

-Chris

[KeriSalyards]

Thank you so much for this Chris!