Courses vs Sections

[Aboyd018]

I work for a college at the graduate level. We have two separate programs here. One for education, and one for management. We want to keep those separate. I added the courses that are offered for each program and just made them "permanent" courses. Am I able to do that and then have sections that correlate with the term that the course is offered in (Fall 2023, Fall 2024, etc.)? That way our professors do not have to keep making material over and over again for the same thing?  

[James · Accepted solution]

@Aboyd018 

While possible to put multiple timeframes into a single course via the use of sections, I would strongly discourage it [feel free to insert stronger emotions]  for traditional term-based courses that have any kind of due dates at all. It may work for open-entry/open-exit courses in certain circumstances.

Instead, create a course for each term to hold the students and due dates and life will be a lot easier for everyone.

Canvas allows you to copy content from one course to another so faculty do not have to go through and recreate everything. They may need to tweak dates, but that will be a lot easier than trying to manage dates for sections. It also keeps the enrollment to just that term so that they are not seeing students from previous terms, which is what you would get with a single course. It also makes it easier to change the content of the course without affecting students that have already completed it.

You can have master courses that you copy from during that course copy process and you might want to do that. The downside/benefit to that is that you lose any customizations that might have been made by the individual instructors. Whether it's a downside or benefit depends on how much development is done by the instructor vs instructional designers. There are also blueprint courses where you can lock down the ability of the instructor to change things.

If you create a master course, understand that it is for content purposes only.  Do not put students into that master course.

[SusanNiemeyer]

I completely agree with James's approach. Trying to set up "sections" within a master course is ultimately not going to work. While the concept might initially sound like a good idea, the execution of it would be a complete nightmare.

@James I noticed that you used the word "copy" in your post, and I think that you really meant "import." When we look at transferring content on a grand scale from one course shell to another, it is much, much better to "import" the content into the new one.

[James]

@SusanNiemeyer 

I don't really care one way or the other on import vs copy. In my process, I click on "Import existing content" from the settings page, but then choose "Copy a Canvas course" on the next screen. I was using "copy" to distinguish from some other form of import.