Blueprint sync triggering associated course announcements to re-send

[KateMac]

Seeking community guidance as we've not been able to solve this one yet.

The scenario

For some of our blueprints (BP), we'll have upwards of 20 associated courses. To reduce the resourcing it takes to recreate all announcements in each course, we have been creating announcements in the BP, scheduling a delayed delivery well into the future (a year after the course delivery dates) and then syncing to the courses.

This way, all announcements appear in each instance of the course, ensuring consistency. The announcements are then minimally updated in each individual course (location information, key course dates etc.) and are then scheduled to be sent at the appropriate time.

This has been working, for the most part, but on some occasions when we update the BP (not the announcements in the BP) and sync those changes, the syncing of the BP seems to trigger an announcement (usually one or two) to re-send.

We have tried recreating the issue using a variety of scenarios but we cannot ascertain what is triggering the announcement to re-send. 

The BP announcements have not been updated and they are not locked, so they should not be overriding even if changes are made.

And of note, the announcements are emailed as well, even if they have already been sent before. The triggering seems to reset it somehow and sends it as if it were a new announcement.

The question

Has anyone experienced this? Does anyone have any ideas what might be triggering the announcement to send when syncing the BP to the associated courses?

Any advice would be appreciated, or even just to know of similar experiences, as we cannot find anything that remotely touches on this. 

Thank you.

[melodyc_lam]

@KateMac 

I haven't experienced this as we don't do announcements through blueprints, but just from reading the situation, I'm wondering if there's been a situation in a course where the instructor deleted the blueprinted item. In many cases, if you delete the blueprinted item, the item will come back on the next sync. It may be restoring the old item and the instructor supplied date (or lack of date) and then there's another trigger. 

[KateMac]

Thanks melodyc_lam,

I will explore your suggestion, and thank you for taking the time to think this through and offer some guidance. I am confident they were not deleted, as we have the emails from when the announcements were initially sent, but it is not an avenue I had explored so thank you for giving me something to think about.