Question about Cross-Listed Course Enrollment and Content Behavior

[keverson]

Hello Canvas Community,

We’re running a professional education course with two enrollment options:

• One with a final assessment
• One without a final assessment

All other course content is identical.

We decided to try cross-listing the two versions of the course to achieve the following goals:

• Enable students from both versions to participate in shared discussion assignments
• Allow updates made in the parent course (non-assessment version) to automatically populate in the child course (assessment version)
• Maintain two separate Canvas Catalog listings, one for each version of the course.

However, after multiple attempts at cross-listing, we encountered several issues:

1. We cannot view a comprehensive list of enrollments in the parent course.
2. Although we can create two separate Catalog listings, enrollments in the child course do not appear in the parent course—they remain isolated.
3. Updates made in the parent course do not reflect in the child course, contrary to what we expected.

We’ve tried various combinations of troubleshooting:

• Cross-listing before and after publishing the courses
• With and without enrolled students
• With and without course content
• Manually adding SIS IDs (our courses are non-degree and non-credit-earning, so our Canvas instance is not integrated with our university’s SIS, and our courses do not have SIS IDs by default)
• Switching which course is the parent vs. child

None of these approaches resolved the issues.

We’re hoping there’s something simple we’re missing. Has anyone successfully implemented a similar setup or encountered these challenges? Any insight or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance!

[Hildi_Pardo]

Hi @keverson 

I'm not quite understanding the question/issue.   I wonder if this might help:  Crosslisting means "moving" a Section of enrollments from one course to another so that only one Course is being used instead of two.  Crosslisting does not mean combining course content.

In your course I would imagine seeing two Sections of enrollments:  one Section would be the "Assessment" section and one section would be the "No Final" section.     In this way all students can proceed through the entire course until they reach the end and can interact with each other in discussions.  At the end of the course only the "Assessment" section would get assigned to the Final Assessment and the other section would not be assigned to that assignment.

I hope this is somewhat helpful.

[chriscas]

This is exactly what I am envisioning as well, @Hildi_Pardo!

One extra thing to add is that on the Catalog side, you can create two listings for the same Canvas course, but choose the appropriate section to enroll the students in the course listing details there.

-Chris

[oneilllj]

Hi @keverson 

Could you try this set up:

Parent (BluePrint Course) with all the content created and all pages locked, but not the assessment tasks;

Associate and sync the two versions of the course (assessment and non-assessment) to the BP;

Course 1 - Assessment - set up and publish the assignment for submissions

Course 2 - Non assessment - remove or don't publish the assignment

This will enable both courses to run concurrently with the same information, but separates the assessment process as you have outlined. 

Just a general suggestion.

Thanks

Jen