FAST & EASY Way to Copy Content on the FLY

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas
For details, please read through the Canvas Release Notes (2020-01-18) and Canvas Release: Direct Share

A couple of years ago in a community far, far away...

 

I submitted a feature idea to Copy content into multiple courses at once. This feature was marked as completed with the 2016 May update made to Canvas Commons and it does accomplish what was asked for, but we want something more awesome than that.

 

During the time it took to vote on the idea and fully implement it, we had lots of great use cases and sub-ideas that kind of got lost in translation. It turns out that a lot of Canvas users create course assignments, announcements, discussions, quizzes on the fly and they want a FAST & EASY way to send all that to multiple courses all at once. To do this using the current commons workflow it takes 23 clicks, 2 text entry fields, an image selection and some waiting. And then you still have to go back and adjust your assignment groups and due dates!

 

Teachers from K-landia to Academia would all love it if this could be accomplished with less than 3 clicks and take no longer than 1 second. Here's how one popular system does this.

 

Let's up the Awesome and FLY!

 

Reference: Copy an Assignment , Copy a Discussion , Copying assignments from one class to another without using the commons.

 

Comments in completed feature idea: Copy to multiple courses

69 Comments
kmeeusen
Community Champion

Alan:

Have you considered leveraging the course copy process? Actually much quicker than Commons. Create the shared content in a Master course - then copy what you need into each course. Slow workaround for this type of functionality, and perhaps someone has already suggested it, but thought I would give it a try.

KLM

ashucker
Community Novice

I have done that. Specifically, I create a shell course, then I copy the

contents to each of my courses. It is great for starting, but when I add to

a course mid-year, then realize I will need that for the other courses as

well, I still have to do multiple steps to get that material populated into

several other courses. It would be so nice to do a "Copy To" and then check

the courses I want it in and be done.

Thanks for the helpful response, though. I really appreciate any

suggestions for speeding the process.

Alan

On Fri, Sep 2, 2016 at 11:41 AM, kelley.meeusen@cptc.edu <

kmeeusen
Community Champion

You are welcome Alan.

I suspected I was old news, but just in case........................

I think this would be such a great feature to have. Would not need it myself, but recognize that many would. Actually, could likely also need it myself when we create some form of universal content we want to punch out to all courses at our school.

Lets see if this pig has wings and can fly!

KLM

dtheriault
Community Contributor

I'm just curious. Why would anyone vote down on this idea? Eight people voted it down. Is there something we are missing?

dtheriault
Community Contributor

Hmm I shared it on Twitter and it got two more down votes.

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

dtheriault, there's been an irksome bug in Jive that is causing inadvertent downvotes, and Jive is working on a fix. So far, the issue hasn't been consequential for any feature ideas, but this time it might be. Frankly, the only way to remedy that right now as far as I know is to tag the downvoters (I could only come up with seven names) to see if they actually meant to downvote this idea so they can come back to change their votes. So I'll do that now.

 @aabian  , pian ,  @marthazumack  ,  @levesque  ,  @sthuecks2  , Wes.Kriesel ,  @ar767  : If you meant to downvote this idea, could you please post a brief comment letting us know why? And if you didn't mean to downvote it, please come back to the Community to correct your vote. Thanks!

sthuecks2
Community Novice

I meant to upvote and just did again. Not sure what happened there!

marthazumack
Community Contributor

Yes, this was meant to be an upvote! Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

nschwab
Community Member

I just added an intro quiz to 4 different courses, one import at a time. Took about 15 minutes rather than 1. This would be a great option to improve workflow. Could it include an option to copy as 'unpublished' as well (in case minor customizations are needed before students see it) or is that a separate feature request?

clong
Community Champion

Thank You dtheriault​ & stefaniesanders​ I've been messaging people that I know and they have said they voted it up not down so there is a problem but the tagging and messaging is helping. I can tell you this whole process has taken hours to champion and rally votes. getting 100 is no easy task. I sure hope if we break 100 this effort will not be in vain.