admin Controls on courses

[FredHaller]

Is it possible for the Canvas administrator to dictate gradebook settings for groups of courses and/or sections?  We would like to enforce a common set of assignment groups and associated weights for common grade levels and departments.

If this is not possible to dictate, can these settings be included in a template that the teachers are instructed to utilize for those specific courses/sections?

Thanks!

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi @FredHaller 

It is possible to set up a "template course" that includes settings and content that you want to automatically be imported into any new courses created within a sub-account.  We use it to customize/clean up our default course menu and disable tools that we don't generally use.

There are instructions for enabling a course as a course template at https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Admin-Guide/How-do-I-enable-a-course-as-a-course-template/ta-p/46... 

and for adding a template to an account/sub account at https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Admin-Guide/How-do-I-select-a-course-template-in-an-account/ta-p/... 

However, with things like assignment groups and grade weighting, you may run into difficulties if instructors are copying/importing content from previous versions of the course, because they may have assignments set to assignment groups that aren't part of your grade weighting, so the assignments would have to be adjusted so that they are included in the correct assignment groups.