Combining courses on Canvas that might change later.

[Boricua]

If the school/institution changes which students are in the class or moves a class from period 1 to period 5 and I have already cross-sectioned/combined the two classes (I haven't yet), what happens? Is this bad? I ask because the school will probably be moving students in and out throughout the year and if I have already combined those courses I don't know what will happen.

Also, it was recommended on a forum that I combine two completely empty courses but I was planning on doing one of the courses completely (hours and hours of work) and then combining them when I was somewhat sure the classes wouldn't be altered, say... two weeks in. Can I start completing one of the courses in preparation of combining other empty courses or will this ruin the merge with the other empty courses?

Lastly, If I combine the courses will my students still see their dashboard as Math Period 1, Math Period 7, ect. or will everyone see the same class since I merged them all together?  

Thanks for everyone's help.

Feel free to link a post if these were already answered, however, I didn't see them answered.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @Boricua,

I think I can address most of your questions...

First about the combining (cross-listing) of sections and enrollment changes...  It will depend a bit on how your school handles the enrollments, specifically whether the "old" enrollment becomes deleted or marked as inactive.  If it's marked inactive, you could possibly run into a few glitches, as one section would be inactive and one would be active, but I think Instructure has addressed a lot of those little glitched in the last year so hopefully it won't be bad.  If the "old" enrollments are marked as deleted, you shouldn't run into any issues that I know of in general.

Around when you do the cross-listing and whether both courses should be empty... You don't have to have both course shells empty to do the combination (but you probably do want to have one empty, as content is not merged together).  One thing that trips people up often though is that to do the cross-listing, you'd want to start from the empty course shell and cross-list that into the course shell where you've done your development.  I always recommend doing the cross-listing before students are able to see the courses, just to avoid confusion.  In a case where you do have content in both course shells, it's critical that you do the cross-listing before students do any work (assignments, quizzes, discussions, etc) since no content or submissions is merged when cross-listing, you'd completely lost access to all of the already submitted work.

For your final question, students will all see the title of the combined course shell on their dashboard.  This can be confusing to the students who are registered in one of the other courses that have been combined in Canvas, so I recommend making an announcement or sending a message to all students letting them know about the combination and that Canvas may show a different course title than what they registered.

Hope this helps!  Let us know if you have more questions or any followup!

-Chris

[Boricua]

Wow. That covered everything in record time. I really appreciate your feedback and prompt response. I'm leaning on just copying and pasting all the work from course to course this first year. I wish CANVAS allowed me to list a quiz across multiple courses without having to cross-section link/merge. This is the school's first year with Canvas so I'm sure there's going to be a lot of chaos on both ends as everyone learns the system and I don't want to add to it haha

Thanks again for all your help! 

[chriscas]

Hi @Boricua,

Using separate course shells for each "section" (except for officially crosslisted things in our SIS) is the way we do things.  Depending how strictly your school/institution interprets FERPA (or other similar laws if you're outside the USA), this could be a requirement anyways.

With that being said, I do want to make sure you don't mean you're going to literally copy and paste from one course to another, but mean it more figuratively.  Canvas has a great import function, so essentially you just need to build the course once, then go to the course shells for the other sections and import the content (including quizzes) into there.  You can to a complete import at first, but later on if you add or change content, you can selectively import just that content into the other courses.

Hope this helps!

-Chris