After crosslisting, class content wiped

[natyjay]

When one of our teachers attempted to crosslist a class (B) with the parent class A, everything in B disappeared: teachers, students, etc. There is also no longer a button to crosslist or un-crosslist, the button to add People (students) is greyed out, and the class shows up under past enrollment even though the term reads Q4. I'm wondering if this could be a class uploading issue from Infinite Campus, and if the class could be created again. But this is a very weird issue we haven't seen before. B is not showing up on the A's list of sections, but two other classes are.

[nathanboettcher]

Hi, natyjay!

Not to worry, this is functioning as intended. When you cross-listed class B into class A, think of class A as "sucking up" the enrollments of class B. You should see those in the People tab of class A now. As for the content, that is normal. So, why would you cross-list classes?

Say you have two ENGL 101 classes. You're going to teach them the same way, and you already have all your content in one class. You cross-list them so that the enrollments are combined into one class. As for the other class, class B in this case... you don't need it because you already merged the enrollments into one class. Does that make sense? 

This guide will tell you more about this. Oh, and to deCross-list, you just go into class A, click "Sections" and find the section (class B) you cross-listed. Click that section, then click "decross-list" to undo this. Your content and enrollments should be restored.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

Nathan

[natyjay]

It's not functioning as intended. We are able to look at the sections in class A, and we see two of them, neither of which are class B. Looking up B's ID number, I was able to locate and view that class, which is now empty of everything. But it didn't seem to go anywhere else. So we're unable to un-crosslist the class, as the empty version of B no longer shows a de-crosslist button and also doesn't show up under A as a course. I'm the librarian at our school and I have admin permissions, which is why I'm trying to help another teacher with this. We've successfully crosslisted many courses without this specific issue popping up. It's very strange.

[Ron_Bowman]

@natyjay -

Based on this information, I would say that you would probably need to contact Canvas support to see if they can figure out what happened.  Something strange definitely occurred when the cross-list was attempted.

Ron

[nathanboettcher]

Hi natyjay,

Oh, forgive me, I must've misunderstood. I would be really curious to see what the sections tab in the parent course shows, sensitive info redacted of course if there's any there.

[Ron_Bowman]

@natyjay -

@nathanboettcher has the information about cross-listing that should be what you are seeing.  I will state though that the ability to de-crosslist can be removed by the institutions Canvas admins(I cannot de-crosslist my courses, they have to do it).

I was going to respond with what Nathan did until I read your last sentence.  I am not sure why if a course was cross-listed successfully that it would not show up in the sections of the parent course.  Also, It is interesting that you are still seeing the empty course that was cross-listed.  When I cross list, that course goes completely away from ability to view.  To me it sounds like something strange happened with the cross-list and you are going to have to get your Canvas admins to de-crosslist it so you can try again.  The other item I have not familiarity with is the grading period setup (which I think you have because you mentioned Q4).  So I am not sure if that may have had an effect on the cross-list as well.

Ron

[natyjay]

I think you're on to something with the grading periods. I came on as a librarian (and one of our district's Canvas admins) right when Canvas was first rolled out, and whoever did the grading periods on the back end left a huge mess. We have multiples of grading periods, periods that overlap or leave gaps, etc. Next year they'll probably nuke all of that and start over, since it seems too risky to mess with that now, but it's caused headaches before. 

[Ron_Bowman]

@natyjay -

Sounds like the decision to nuke everything and start over is a good idea to clean up everything.  

If you do figure out what caused the problems with this cross-list, please post back with the solution to the problem.  Curious minds want to know.

Good Luck.

Ron

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hi @natyjay ...

@nathanboettcher and @Ron_Bowman have great replies here!  As a former Canvas administrator in higher ed, I cross-listed courses from time to time as well.  I can also tell you that when you cross-list two or more courses, it does not move content...it only moves enrollments.  If I had two courses, A and B (similar to what you described), I could still search for course B in our entire list of courses, and when I went to the "Settings" >> "Section" tab of that course, I wouldn't see any sections listed.  This was an indicator to me that course B was most-likely cross-listed with another course...in this case, course A.

Hopefully this little bit of information will also be helpful to you.  Good luck!