How do I share assignments & quizzes between classes?

[sshoup1]

I have a middle school class and a high school class with basically the same content.  Each time I change a quiz or assignment detail, I have to do the same changes in both classes.  I assign several quizzes per week so this is very tedious and redundant- to make the same changes twice.

[kmeeusen]

Hi  @sshoup1  

You are going to love the Direct Share feature being released on 1/18/20. You can learn more at https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-18148-canvas-release-direct-share 

Kelley

[kbink]

Hi Susan,

I can think of a few solutions for this.

One solution is to have both courses on one Canvas site.  You can do this by crosslisting the two class sites together.  There are some things to know about this solution.  

• The original classes will be sections inside the one course site and you can assign anything graded to one or the other section or both.
• You can grade by section, so in speedgrader you can do one class at a time.
• You cannot assign content to just one section.  For example if you have a page on modules, everyone will see that page.  If you put links to assignments on pages, everyone will see those links, but only those assigned to that assignment will be able to access it after clicking the link.  The others get a message that they don't have access to that assignment (or something to that effect).
• When you need to edit something, you edit the one copy that is in the one course site and everyone gets the changes.

Another solution is to create a Blueprint course.  A blueprint course has no students in it and it contains the content and assessments that you want to share between the courses.  Each of the separate course sites becomes a child site.  You can add content to the children course sites that is not shared, and there are settings on the blueprint site that can allow you to make changes to the shared content inside a child course if you want.  Once the blueprint connections are set up, you make changes to the blueprint course (adding new things or editing existing things) and sync them out to the child courses.  There are some tricky parts to this but the blueprint option allows you to make edits during the semester.  One key tricky part is that if you allow the children courses to edit items, once they are edited, the sync feature for that item is disabled.

Fair warning.  I believe these need to be enabled for your Canvas installation and may even need to be set up by your admins.  

Good Luck!

Kalli