Duplicate, Clone, or Copy anything in Canvas

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas
An option to "make a copy" should be present on nearly every gear in Canvas -- modules, quizzes, assignments, announcements, pages, discussions, rubrics...

 

Consistency is an important element of good course design, and this would help instructors and designers achieve it more easily.

 

Ideas related to this have been developed and depoyed

 

This idea was completed through the Khaki 2017: Priorities & Related Ideas

Here are the content items that were completed as part of Khaki

- Module Item Duplication: Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-11-18) 

- Module Duplication: Canvas Production Release Notes (2018-06-23) 

- Assignment Duplication: Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-07-15) 

- Discussion Duplication: Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-10-28) 

- Page Duplication: Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-07-15) 

You can read more about Khaki in What in the world does “Khaki” have to do with Canvas?

*We know that the ability to copy a rubric from the rubric manager does not currently exist, but we have elected to mark this idea as complete anyways.  If copying a rubric is something that you think should be developed, please add your comment and vote to https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/5167" modifiedtitle="true" title="Copy a rubric.

154 Comments
brian_fineberg
Community Novice

I agree!!

efilardi
Community Novice

+1 Want! Hope this gets pushed through asap...

bdalotto1
Community Member

Add my vote for this feature...while items currently can be copied, it's too much of a work around--we need convenience!

doug_edwards
Community Novice

It would sure simplify things

adrianne_schulz
Community Novice

This is a great idea!

SethBattis
Community Contributor

In the vein of examples of ways this is being done currently, here's a hack that I slapped together for our faculty. (The original motivation was to make it easier to create letter-graded assignments with a consistent grading scheme, but it lets teachers create templates for common assignment types, and will let them template discussions and wiki pages by the end of June (those are disabled right now because they're not entirely foolproof yet).

As previously noted on ​ (which has been archived as a duplicate of this feature):

shauna_vorkink
Community Contributor

James - Thanks for sharing your hard work with everyone!

jordan
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Seth, that is awesome! What does it take to add that tool?

Also, how hard would it be to add an option that allow the users to quantify how many copies of the A/D/Q that they want? Does this tool work with Pages as well?

SethBattis
Community Contributor

Thanks, Jordan! It will work with pages shortly. And discussions.

The code is up on Github​ -- it's a bit of a mish-mash, because I slapped it together in a few periods and was in the midst of transitioning from one set of libraries to another: it has both a required Git submodule and uses Composer.

It would be relatively straight-forward to modify it to create more than one duplicate -- you'd just need to go back and edit the duplicates individually by hand, rather than being dumped straight into the edit view. (Although, I suppose, one could trick it out to just open all of the new copies in new tabs.)

PSU_Tony
Community Contributor

Travis, not all of us have the luxury of this Kennethware you speak of. We need to clone Kenneth! Can we borrow him for a semester?