How to determine whether an unpublished course has been modified?

[cph2]

Hi all,

I am looking for a query that will allow me to tell how many courses for the upcoming fall term have been modified since these have been created through the SIS Upload process. Does anyone have a suggestion?

Alternatively, is there a way to get a list of courses sorted by last activity or last access? This does not appear to be one of the ways to sort courses in the beta release. 

Thanks for any information you can provide!

[kona]

 @cph2 , due to the technical nature of this question I've shared it with the Canvas Developers‌ group in the Community. They are the ones that do a lot of the back-end stuff with Canvas and should hopefully be able to help!

Kona

[James]

 @cph2 ,

Are your courses blank or do they have content copied into them?

If they are blank, then you could query the API and ask for a list of assignments or content pages and the presence of any would mean that it had been modified. You would need to iterate through the list of courses and do this for each course.

If they have content copied into them already, then you could make the same API calls, but look at the updated_at date in the object to see if it was more recent than when the course was created. Again, you would need to iterate through the list of courses and do this for each course.

Looking for teacher activity in a course doesn't necessarily mean that content has changed, but it will let you know that at least the course has been visited. You can use the get course-level participation data to see how many views and participations happen on each day. I checked and it did show my activity in my summer courses before they were published (so I know it wasn't students). You would need to take the list of courses and iterate through them.

In all of these cases, you could probably start with a list of unpublished courses to narrow down the list of courses to check for activity. You can get that through the list courses endpoint of the Accounts API (I think you need the query parameter state[]=claimed to get the unpublished ones) or there is a report available through the web interface.

[cph2 · Accepted solution]

Thanks very much for the response!

We were trying to figure out which courses had been worked on by faculty so

that we could exempt them from the application of our new Blueprint course.

We were able to get this through the teachers' activity on the fall courses

but couldn't rely only on the creation of content, since the settings pages

were also modified in some cases (tracked only as content "home").

Your help is appreciated!

Cheryl Handsaker

Academic Application Developer / Project Manager

Office of Information Technology, Williams College

On Fri, Jun 29, 2018 at 8:08 AM, kona@richland.edu <instructure@jiveon.com>

[James]

 @cph2 , I figured it was related to see which faculty had done work on their courses.

I haven't used blueprint courses, but the Canvas Release: Blueprint Courses says 

Any items that are not locked can be managed individually by a course instructor. Content that can be managed by an instructor is not overwritten when the Blueprint Course is synced to associated courses, and new content created in any associated course is also not affected.

If that is still true (I don't know if it is), shouldn't you be able to update the blueprint courses anyway? Have you tested what you want to do and found there were issues with overwriting?

[cph2]

Thanks so much! It turned out that there were only a handful of courses

impacted. We simply wanted to have conversations with those faculty members

before making changes that might impact how the courses appeared.

Cheryl Handsaker

Academic Application Developer / Project Manager

Office of Information Technology, Williams College

On Sat, Jun 30, 2018 at 2:29 AM, professorbeyrer@gmail.com <