Assignments from previous courses are randomly porting over

[alex_voigt]

So I've been teaching the same course for several years and I'm beginning to notice that assignments from previous Canvas courses are porting over to my current course without me having imported them in any way. Consequently, students are occasionally submitting their work to the incorrect version of an assignment. Additionally, it is royally messing up my Canvas gradebook because the grading categories from the previous course are sporadically porting over, pushing student grade percentages out of whack. I'm having to go through manually to fix this on a consistent basis and I can't find a clear answer in any community thread. I've also never had this issue with Canvas and am becoming deeply frustrated, so is there some sort of bug people are noticing?

[YvonnePhipps]

i am also experiencing this issue. Is there a fix for this?

[james_whalley]

@alex_voigt, that does sound alarming. Have you looked at your course's import page to see if there is any weird import activity occurring? Are there any other admins, instructors, or TAs in your current course? Is your course attached to a blueprint?

[alex_voigt]

Hello James,

I'm not sure what you're referring to by "attached to a blueprint." I've taught the same course for several years and the settings on the course are similar to what they've been in previous years, so I'm not sure how it could've done that. There are other teachers in my PLC that can view my course, but they can't import content and it wouldn't make sense for them to do so anyway since they only have access to it for comparing setup/assignments. It seems like I've been having issues ever since I was instructed to stop getting old assignments from previous years by going to old Canvas pages and copying the assignment to my current course. Instead I'm supposed to get old assignments by going to "Settings" in my current course and "Import Course Content," which has multiple extra steps and an easy-to-miss "import all content from course" option that I thought I deselected. The tech integrationist can't figure out why it's happening either and it just seems like there's been more issues with Canvas this year than there's been in previous years.

[NicoletteStaley · Accepted solution]

@alex_voigt I recommend that you contact Canvas Support with this specific question as they can take a close look at the import history of your course and determine precisely where the assignments originated from.  Additionally, whether you used the Import Course Content tool available in the Course Settings or not, you may want to look at it anyways.  The Import Content Tool logs all imports that occur in a course (including ones that originate in a different course using the Copy To... function).  Though it only provides a small amount of information in the UI, it can help indicate what may have happened.  Many times a module might be copied from two different by similar courses resulting a duplicates instead of overwriting content.