When will the issues with Course Copying be resolved? Images!

[badams_madison]

At the University of Wisconsin, we use Canvas. Periodically, we need to copy an older course into a new course shell. The main issue we encounter is that images from the originating course (the one we copy from) may or may not show-up when Students view the new course.  

Our only remedy at this time is inefficient. Specifically, we have to:

1. Download images from the original course + copy the associated Alt Text.
2. Navigate to the new course. 
3. Remove the images. 
4. Upload images to each page (re-doing the layout).
5. Re-add the Alt Text for each image. 

This is a known issue for the University of Wisconsin as documented in the linked KB article. This is not a new issue and it impacts us today. I spent an unexpected 40 hours diagnosing and using the steps above so that students can view course images. 

If Instructure is not going to remedy or improve the current functionality notes in the linked KB article, staff and management will have to budget, on the average, an extra 40 hours per course copy.  

The big question is: 

Does Instructure have any plans to rectify?

[Chris_Hofer]

Good morning, @badams_madison ...

Hello from Fond du Lac, WI!  Every so often I see questions here in the Community about images not showing up properly in courses.  Often, the embedded image appears as a broken image that cannot be viewed...which is what I'm assuming is happening for you?  Have you tried reaching out to the Canvas Support folks to report this issue?  That way, they can log your ticket, do some investigation, and do some troubleshooting with you to see if this can be resolved.  Sometimes, they need to send these kinds of issues to their engineering folks to do some further investigation, too.  But, they are really good at making sure you're informed of any updates and if it was fixed (if need be).  Here's a Guide to get you started:

How do I contact Canvas Support? - Canvas Community

I hope this will be of some help to you.  Let Community members know if you have any other questions about this...thanks!  Take care...be well.

[badams_madison]

Chofer, 

I totally believe that you are seeing other questions come-up on this topic. Why? Because it has broad impacts.

When you copy a course, the image files stay linked to the originating course. The UW KB Article fully outlines this ongoing issue. Yes, duly reported and here's the response as found in the University of Wisconsin's Knowledge Base: https://kb.wisc.edu/luwmad/page.php?id=86127

The workaround? The University of Wisconsin has documented the steps in the KB Article. 

Chofer? Please parse the KB Article and if you have any additional insights, the Community at large would benefit from sharing.  

Thank you. 

[HOWARDWILLIAMS]

As of 8/4/2024 this is still broken.  What's worse is that the course I copied in Commons is missing the images too - you go to the Files tab for the content and it shows all of the files but when you click through to them they are 404s (file not found).

[Chris_Hofer]

@HOWARDWILLIAMS ...

I cannot say this with any certainty, but maybe it's possible that the person who shared that content to Commons also had broken links/images in the course and may not have ensured that things were working properly before it was shared to Commons?  Do you know what the Commons content was called?  Was it available to everyone in Commons?  Was it only available to folks at your school?  If it was available to everyone, could you share a screenshot of what the Commons item looked like so that we could maybe try importing it into our own sandbox course to test things on our end?  Hopefully we can figure out why you're encountering these issues...thanks!

[DanielleW876]

I'm the Canvas Administrator at MVA and we are currently experiencing exactly this and using the same workaround from the original author which takes quite some time to do. Has anyone received any updates or next steps to having this resolved? 😣

[Canvasisbroken]

I am still experiencing this issue on 2024-10-21. In previous years I was able to copy classes with the images, but this has since broken. Obivously, we could reimport every image, but it completely defeats the purpose of canvas.

Shame on the canvas developers for deploying such a broken piece of software.

[GrahamSmallwood]

Re-upping this.  Still happens, and it is sneaky since the pages work for me.  They don't work for students because they can't access my dev.  How is this possibly still an issue?  Copying a course is useless if it doesn't take the images with it.

[GrahamSmallwood]

https://help.ohio.edu/TDClient/30/Portal/KB/PrintArticle?ID=865

This bug is widespread because it is a problem caused by an intentional feature, not a bug.  The problem is Canvas developers have made an assumption (server doesn't want dupe files) and not provided controls to turn the assumption off (without 777-style access control we need a second copy of the file with different settings).

The workaround is getting the original class to CopyTo from the original class's Files section.  So B Imports A, then A CopyTo on B to send the missing pictures.