Hi Emily,
The problem as we understand it is to take Rediker Course and Section IDs, which are only unique within the school year, and make them globally unique within our Canvas account. This snippet from our online ops manual describes how we solved that problem:
There is a syntax we must follow for creating all Courses and Sections in Canvas so as to keep the Canvas IDs globally unique. Admin+ re-uses Course and Section IDs so we "munge" the Admin+ IDs with additional info to create informative and unique Canvas IDs.
A Course looks like this: 250:SP16-Crow
A Section looks like this: 250-01:SP16-Crow
What it means:
- 250 = Course Number from Admin+. For non-production (non Admin+) Courses, the Course may be given as "TEST" or "PLAY" or "ADMIN".
- TEST - courses to test a process or concept, typically narrow visibility and short lived
- PLAY - courses given to users to explore and learn with, typically broad visibility and longer lived
- ADMIN - courses created for school-wide use, e.g. template courses
- "-" = Course / Section and Term / Teacher separator.
- 01 = Section Number from Admin+
- SP16 = Term, in the form TTYY where TT is one of [FL, SP, YR] (meaning Fall, Spring, and Year -long courses, respectively) and YY is the last two digits of the year.
- Crow = Teacher's name
The primary requirement is that the concatenation of all of these values produce an account-wide (school-wide) unique identifier in Canvas for the Course and the Section. I hope this helps. If you have any feedback I would be welcome to hear it.
Best,
-J
