Mass Delete of Courses

[mhinojosa]

I am in the process of cleaning up my Canvas Training courses. Some of them go back almost 2 years and most of the teachers can't even access them because of the date restrictions. Is there anyway to do a mass delete for this course? Some were set up with a manual term and I'm not really worried about those. But I have some going back to the beginning of fall 2016 and none of the teachers in those courses are using them. If I have to delete them one by one, ugh, I will, but is there a way to do a mass delete? Any help would be appreciated!!!

[kona]

 @mhinojosa , I'm not sure of the answer to this question, but I'm going to share it with the https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/canvas-developers?sr=search&searchId=3ddd5fdd-87be-4506-bfc1-...‌ group in the Community to see if they can help!

[muh]

 @mhinojosa ‌, the api to delete/conclude a course is this one(Courses - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation ). You may use Postman (Postman | Supercharge your API workflow ) to quickly test the course deletion on Beta or Test server. Once you are familiar with the api and Postman, then you could follow this instruction (Running a collection ) for batch delete courses.

[mhinojosa]

Thanks for the information. I will look into it.

[dgrobani]

Another approach is to run a provisioning report for the subaccount the courses are in, edit the resulting CSV file and change the status of the relevant courses to 'deleted', tweak the columns to match the SIS import format, and run an SIS import on the file.

[garth]

I agree with dgrobani‌ on this, I have used the provisioning report to delete and undelete courses.

The provisioning report is a very easy way to mass delete courses.

[WhitneyBaker]

I am so confused.... I have tried this numerous times and it just fails every time. I don't know what I am doing wrong. Nothing happens and I get the error message that those courses do not have a SIS ID even though they do have a SIS ID.....

[chriscas]

Hi @WhitneyBaker,

If all of your courses have an SIS_Id attached to them, you can run an sis_export report instead of a provisioning report.  The provisioning report has some additional columns, and I think possibly different column names for some things than the sis import expects, so that may be what is throwing things off.  The sis_export report should be correctly formatted to modify and import directly.

-Chris

[armanirivera]

Question on this: are we able to re-import those same courses at a later time with the same SIS ID's? Or will it error out because the SIS ID's are "in-use" (ghost records)?

[Robbie_Grant]

 @mhinojosa ,

We are giving the Canvas Admins area a little bit of love (especially questions that are really, really old) and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie