Course SIS Import has not associated courses with template

[NYBG]

Hi all, 

New in an admin role and I have just attempted to to provision a bunch of courses with a course SIS upload. 

Although it seems I got most of the formatting correct using this to guide me there are a few things that have gone wrong. 

For one, the courses have not automatically been associated with the course template they are supposed to be associated with. Our template is attached to an account called Continuing Education, which has a certain amount of sub accounts. In my import sheet I had used the sub account SIS IDs for each course in a column called accounts_id (as specified by Canvas). My thinking being that because all of these IDs where sub account IDs (BOT for Botany, GAR for Gardening etc.) to the Continuing Education account, the template would associate with them. 

My question thus is: IN the SIS course upload sheet, should I just have used the account SIS ID of Continuing Education, the main account that has the template associated with it, for all of the courses in the account_id column?

Furthermore, now that I have the course shells in canvas but they are not associated with their template, my instinct was to delete them, but I don't want to generate new course SIS IDs. What should I do there? Should I delete the SIS IDs of each course in course settings and then delete each course one by one? I want to start from scratch basically and I want to get the SIS course import right (template associating and all that). 

Should I just manually associate the template with the 28 shells I now have? 

Hope that makes sense.

Please help :')

[stimme · Accepted solution]

@NYBG  Sorry to hear your templates didn't work. If template course content was not imported to your newly created courses, then some step of the process to set templates for the subaccounts must not be complete. (You may want to double check the content import list in one of the courses to be sure that it didn't receive an import from an unexpected template.) One must designate a course as a template on its settings page then designate it as the account template in the (sub)account's settings page. 

How do I enable a course as a course template? 

How do I select a course template in an account? 

Subaccounts can be configured to inherit the template designated for their parent account. Please double check the template course setting in the subaccounts under Continuing Ed. It should not be necessary to create the courses at a higher level subaccount just because that's where the template course is.

You suggested several courses of action to try to get the template content into your courses. The simplest thing to do is make sure the templates are correctly designated then reset the courses. Resetting a course moves its name & SIS ID to a new empty course shell, and the new course should get a content migration from the template for its subaccount. (I just tested this, and it worked this way for me.)

How do I reset course content? 

You used the term "associated" in your post, but that is typically reserved for blueprint courses in Canvas, not template courses. Courses associated to blueprints can receive multiple syncs as content is added to the blueprint throughout terms. Template courses are used as the source for one-time course content migrations. Changes in a template course will only be received by newly made courses after the changes.

Course Content Distribution Comparison