What happens when I dissociate a course from a blueprint?

[tim_littleton]

Hi,

We think that the way in which blueprints synchronize with existing courses creates such uncertainty that we have decided to dissociate the course after creation.

We create a complex blueprint containing as much static information as possible then create a new empty course and associate this with the blueprint. The course is synchronized and all is as expected. The new course looks great and is ready to hand over to the teacher.

At this point we are going to dissociate the new course. This will leave the course in the hands of the teacher without the risk of any future synchronizing affecting the course.

I am reaching out to hear if anyone has tried similar and if so how did it work out? We are worried that we may experience unexpected behaviour to the newly created course.

Any input is welcome.

Regards

Tim Littleton

[nwilson7 · Accepted solution]

@tim_littleton We do something very similar.  We use a blueprint course at the beginning of each term to apply basically just some course settings to every course. We used to have a bunch more but based on faculty feedback we switched to just applying some course settings.

We have a blueprint course setup specifically for this that we never sync through the blueprint tool within the course. We only use it when we do our initial upload of courses for the term, we add the column in the CSV to associate a blueprint.  We remove that column on the next upload so it only does that first initial sync (not again through the daily syncs).  We were leaving it in there but we were finding that caused the courses to re-sync each day and it was resetting some of the changes faculty were making such as setting their homepage.

So, we don't disassociate the course, we leave it associated but never sync it after the initial time.  It should work the same as disassociating it but our method was quicker than disassociating 2500ish courses for us.

Hope this helps!

Nick