Blueprint course won't find associates

[kerry_floyd]

I have looked around for an answer to this, but can't find one.

When I got to associate a blueprint with a course, it won't give me a complete list of available courses. It will show me fully-populated courses that I don't want to associate, but it won't show me the empty courses that I do want to associate. I have tried publishing them, unpublishing them, removing users, and creating blank courses with nothing in them. All to no avail! I don't know what the secret is. Anyone have ideas? 

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi  @kerry_floyd ‌...

While I don't have an answer for you myself, I am going to tag  @kblack ‌ in this posting because he's done quite a bit of testing in his own Canvas environment (check out https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/higher-ed/blog/2017/08/05/designing-maintaining-and-perhaps-r...‌).  So, maybe he'll have some answers for you.

[kblack]

Thanks for the tag,  @Chris_Hofer ‌!   @kerry_floyd ‌, my first guess is that the course(s) you are trying to associate the blueprint course site with are not in the same (or lower) subaccount.  It's an all too easy thing to overlook, though it is indeed mentioned in this document:

Associated courses must reside in the same or a lower subaccount than where the blueprint course resides.

I remember this caused a bit of grumbling in the Community, and in fact cms_hickss‌ did a great illustration of this in one of her comments in the Blueprint Release Notes.

Do you think that may be the issue, Kerry?

[kerry_floyd]

We only have one account, so that's not it. I also verified that the blueprints are in account!  

[kblack]

Well, that's odd then.  But a course being empty (or not) should not even enter into the equation.  And you verified that your intended associated courses ARE all up on the server, correct?  This may be something to contact Support about, then.  I encountered some glitches similar to that while it was still on our beta installation and wrote it off to still being a work in progress (or user error on my part), so as bad as this sounds, it may be worthwhile just letting things sit for a bit and see if it works in a few hours or on Monday.

 I'm definitely interested in hearing how this is resolved, though, so please keep the Community posted!

[kerry_floyd]

Good idea, but no luck. Many courses still do not show up in the list as options to associate, even after waiting through the weekend. Here's a summary of how random this seems to be:

• Some courses that are very old are not available.
• Some content-populated old courses are available. 
• Some newly created (both published and unpublished) courses become available immediately.
• Some newly created courses don't ever become available.

[cms_hickss]

Hi  @kerry_floyd  - 

Have you checked to see if the role you have/are using has the "Blueprint Courses (create / edit / associate / delete)" permission enabled? 

[kerry_floyd]

I'm the account admin, so I have permissions. I got other courses to successfully associate, but not all of them are even available to me on the list, which is the weird part.

[kblack]

I will be really curious to hear what Support says about this, Kerry.  The fact that all are in the same subaccount, you're the admin....something's not adding up.  My only other thought was if some instructors already combined sections together on their own.

[kerry_floyd · Accepted solution]

Ok! Here's the answer! It was in the wrong subaccount, but it wasn't one that was listed on my accounts page when I click the Admin button. Here's what happened:

I created the course that I wanted to be the blueprint by clicking the "Start a New Course" button on my dashboard. The dialogue box that pops up is quite simple, without any reference to subaccounts. This has been my normal process for ages because it's right there when I login. Turns out, this automatically puts the new course in a "manually created courses" subaccount, which I didn't know existed because we don't use subaccounts for anything. 

When you create the course from the Admin tab you get the option to put it in the main account rather than in a subaccount, and voila, it works! 

[Stef_retired]

 @kerry_floyd  Thank You for coming back to post the solution! That's a good tip about being mindful of how and from where you create the course that's going to serve as the blueprint.

[cms_hickss]

Hopefully this diagram will help anyone else who might have a location issue with the blueprint course and the course it needs to be associated with: