Courses SIS Import

[JLuchsinger]

When importing the list of courses for a new term, I noticed that old announcements will also be imported. 

Is there a way to import courses without their announcements? Or do I have to copy each individual course to the new term?

Thank you!

[mbmacdonald]

When doing a course copy, you can choose "Specific Content" instead of "All Content, then click "Import", and THEN you will get the option to select the content you want. Select everything except announcements. 

I will say, I have been recommending this to my faculty, but the advice hasn't really sunk in.

[paul_fynn]

Hi @mbmacdonald 

In our institution we have gradually eliminated some of what is generally available to teachers in course import. This includes:-

• course settings - we want the latest institutional version, ot previous versions
• assignments - we don;t want last years assignments copied outwith our end to end processes
• files - this is a new one - having implemented Ally accessibility checker, we noted that colleagues were importing defunct and moribund content that wasn't in use anyway that obscured the accessibility picture  

The way that we currently implement this is that our ITS team insert a javascript into the page load that (similar to an ad blocker) stops the options from appearing

• It would be cleaner if Canvas offered local menu based customisation of what is available to copy.

This doesn't directly answer your question, as I believe that you are looking for the same capability at a bulk import level, which we don't currently do. However Canvas REST API documentation suggests that this is possible - see https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/courses.html#method.content_imports.copy_course_content

• This really suggests that there *ought* to be an opportunity to fine tune this for individual import at account level, so perhaps I'm missing something ....

[JLuchsinger]

I am familiar of this way. But I was seeing if there was a 'work smarter not harder' way with the courses.csv file. 

[mbmacdonald]

Gotcha, sorry I misunderstood your initial question. I actually think I still don't understand it. You mentioned "importing a list of courses for the new term" - how exactly do you do that? You mentioned the courses.csv file, that's what we use too. But I don't see anywhere in the documentation that indicates where you can specify to copy content from a previous course.

But @paul_fynn is talking about using the API - is that what you're referring to as well?

This is new information for me - are other institutions doing course copies in bulk *for* their faculty? Intriguing idea... I'm not sure how it would work here. How would you know if an instructor really does want a course copy done?