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

[keverson]

Hi @chriscas, thank you for your reply!

We were able to create the two separate listings in Catalog for the two different sections (Assessment and Non-Assessment).  So, that part seems to be working ok! It's the Canvas side that seems off.

[keverson]

Hi @Hildi_Pardo, thank you for the quick response!

What you are describing is what we tried, so it's encouraging that it seems like we were on the right path! We tried cross-listing the Assessment course into the Non-Assessment course based on the following that we read in this article:

• "Cross-listing allows you to move section enrollments from individual courses and combine them into one course." Sounds great, we want this!
• "This feature is helpful for instructors who teach several sections of the same course and only want to manage course data in one location." Also great, it would be very handy to just make updates to the Parent course and have the updates reflect in all sections! Plus, we could just assign the Final Assessment to one section.
• "Instructors can allow students to view users in other sections or limit them to only view users in the same section." Sounds perfect, we want both sections to participate in discussions together!

Unfortunately, what we found after cross-listing was that:

• We aren't seeing all enrollments combined into one course.  My follow-up question to this is, should we be able to see all students enrolled from both sections when we navigate to Admin > Courses > Settings > People?
• If we update the Parent course, we don't see the updates in both sections. We're not sure if this is due to enrollment being done through Canvas Catalog, or something else, but changes we make are not visible to both sections.
• Students from both sections are not able to participate together in discussions. Students in both sections can see the discussion and respond to it, but are not able to see posts/replies from other sections (even though the discussion is assigned to everyone)

We're not sure if the issue is that we are missing a step or doing something wrong when cross-listing, or if there is an issue on the back end of our setup.

[chriscas]

Hi @keverson,

Just to clean up some terminology here, which may throw some people off while reading...  When you use Canvas crosslist functionality in Canvas, you are just moving an entire section from one course to another.  On the Canvas side, everything ends up in a single course.  In this scenario most people wouldn't usually use the "parent course" terminology, that's usually more used when talking about Blueprint courses where there is one course with content that flows down to other courses.

I think the Catalog side is likely going to just show you people enrolled in each individual "course" (which is really a section in Canvas).  On the Canvas LMS side, if you visit the People tool, you should see all of the students there.  They should also be able to use a discussion together and everything else you appear to want.  See this redacted screenshot from the People area in one of our cross-listed courses, where you can see users from different sections all together.

If you don't see this on the Canvas LMS side of things, it's likely that the crosslist wasn't done properly.

I'll also point out one caveat at this point too...  If you crosslist after students have already done work, all of the work the students in the section you crosslist into another course have done so far will essentially be lost.  Setting up the crosslisting should really be done before students are enrolled and start working on things to avoid this, but I don't know it if's too late for that for you now.

Does this info help at all?

-Chris

[keverson]

Hi @chriscas ,

Thank you for clarifying the terminology!  The instructions we followed for cross-listing a course uses the terms Parent and Child course so we just kind of ran with that.  Apologies for any confusion!

When we check the People tool in the Canvas LMS, we do NOT see all of the students listed there (we sure wish we did!) like in the screenshot you provided.

We agree, there must be something wonky with the cross-listing, but we just can't figure out what.

I will note that our courses do not have an SIS ID by default because our instance of Canvas LMS is not associated with our institution's ERP (Banner), because our office is building non-credit, non-degree-earning courses (come on, Canvas Career!) We read at one point that courses not having the SIS ID could sometimes cross-list incorrectly/incompletely, so we had even tried manually adding SIS IDs before cross-listing.  No luck though, we were still encountering the same issues.

We have not yet launched registration for the course, and the course won't be live for a couple more months.  We have been using test accounts, so no student work will be lost.

Yes, this was very helpful!  Everyone's responses have been, we appreciate all the info.

[dbrace]

Hi @keverson,

I cannot speak to everything that you are doing (we do not use Catalog) but it is possible (even if not associated with an ERP / SIS system) to give a Canvas section an SIS ID.

You can do it through the GUI (https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Admin-Guide/How-do-I-add-a-section-to-a-course-as-an-admin/ta-p/1...) and manually created CSV imports (https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Admin-Guide/How-do-I-format-CSV-text-files-for-uploading-SIS-data...). When uploading the CSV files, if the sections already exist and were created from the GUI, you might need to use the "Override UI Changes" option (https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Admin-Guide/How-do-I-import-SIS-data-to-a-Canvas-account/ta-p/98).

If the sections have already been created, I find it easiest to do using the API (https://developerdocs.instructure.com/services/canvas/resources/sections).

These sections and their SIS IDs do not need to be associated with any other systems that are or are not integrated with Canvas (it is something I do through CSV uploads for incompletes after each semester).

I hope this helps, especially with the cross-listing that you are trying to do.

-Doug

[keverson]

Thank you, Doug!  We did try adding the SIS ID through the GUI, but that didn't make any difference for us.

[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

[keverson]

Hi @oneilllj, thank you for this !

We followed your suggestion, and the BluePrint course worked great for updating the Assessment and Non-Assessment courses. We were also able to add the assessment to only the Assessment course. So it seems to have resolved at least part of the issue!

I tried cross-listing the Assessment course into the Non-Assessment course again after we confirmed that course updates via the BluePrint course were working.  However, we were finding the same issues as before - enrollments to the different sections were not combined into one course, and students from both sections could not interact in the discussion posts.

[keverson · Accepted solution]

We reached out to Canvas support as well and did end up resolving the issue.  We did not realize that cross-listing could not be done before students had enrolled.  Once we tested it with students enrolled in both courses, the cross-listing worked beautifully.

Thank you to everyone who responded, this really is a great community!