Copy courses and maintain item bank edit permissions?

[Seangt]

Right now it appears that when we do a course copy, if it uses item banks that are shared with the original course, the new course will also have those item banks shared with it, but only with view permissions, not edit. 

Is there a way to copy a course so that the new course instructors are also given edit permissions to the item banks? 

Like, if the original course is deleted or "concluded" will that help? 

I'm not sure we want to change it forever, but sometimes we copy a course and want to transfer those permissions because we are creating a new version of a master/template course and no longer using the old one. It's a pain to have to edit each item bank and adjust the permissions. 

But, other times like when using blueprints and creating courses from it, it's good that only the blueprint has the edit permissions. 

Thanks for anyone with insights here. 

[kroeninm · Accepted solution]

Hi @Seangt I was just doing some testing this week with permissions and found the behavior I saw matches what you mention here but with the risks of using Item Banks for some work flows I think it's preferred.  There is not a good workflow right now to transfer ownership of a course and banks from one instructor to another without some risk.  A few key issues I think would need to be resolved first.

• If an instructor in one course deletes an Item Bank, it deletes it from all other courses that are using that Item Bank. (quizzes in progress and submissions already made stay intact)
• If an instructor in one course edits a question in an Item Bank, it also edits it in all other courses that are using that Item Bank.
• There is no undelete option for an Item Bank. (unless it's an Admin feature)
• You cannot bulk export a full course inclusive of Item Banks and reimport them and thus share a copy of a course with a new instructor or to back it up in case of accidental deletion.

In schools that never used Classic Quizzes I can se there being much less risk but I think it's often not intuitive for users coming from the existing Canvas toolset to understand that there is only one global Item Bank so accidental deletions from faculty wanting to clean up their Canvas (i.e. maybe they no longer teach the class) I worry about...  They may think when they let a colleague copy their course content that it truly is as copy.  

A top feature request would be to bulk share or duplicate Item Banks though!  I haven't seen if that's in the timeline soon but that might help a bit too.  

Melanie

[kroeninm]

Just to correct my posting above, I spoke too soon on the last bullet item!  The last item has now been updated, with the latest updates, it appears in Beta and soon Prod that you can duplicate a course including the banks and quizzes all at once.  So though it doesn't necessarily help with the idea of transferring permissions as "can edit" when you copy a course, it's another option for duplicating a template in whole and passing it along to a new instructor.

You can create a duplicate of an entire quiz including the item banks in several ways:  Use the Send to function, Export the Quiz and import it as a QTI .zip file, Export the entire course and import it.

Reference -Copy, Share, Export, Import - Expected behaviors of banks? 

Melanie