Simultaneous assignment editing

[acelaya]

After searching I couldn't find the Canvas guide or rules relating to simultaneous assignment editing. Our college has many quality assurance workers who go through our courses for various reasons, making edits as they see fit. If two people are editing the same assignment, what is the expected behavior? Are they even allowed to do that, or does the second person receive an error message stating that there is another person already editing the assignment?

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello @acelaya ...

As far as I am aware, there is no warning.  The scenario you presented is not possible in Canvas.  If two people are editing a page of content in your course at the same time, once person "A" saves the page, that is what Canvas will save.  If person "A" doesn't make any more changes, and person "B" saves his/her changes, it will undo the changes that were just made by person "A" because the changes from person "B" were save most recently.

I suppose what you could do is embed a Google Document or an Office 365 document on your content page.  That way, you can share the document with multiple people who can work on it at one time.  The down side to this is that the content really lives outside of Canvas on a Google or Microsoft server, so if you want to keep all content truly within Canvas, this wouldn't be an option to pursue.

I hope this will help a bit.  Let Community members know if you have any other questions...thanks!  Take care, stay safe, and be well.

[acelaya]

Thanks! Yeah that's what I suspected. That is very interesting behavior, because if there is no way to know if another person is editing course content at the same time as you, it means that organizations need to designate a single person for editing course content in order to avoid the possibility of lost edits. Is there really no way to protect against lost edits other than to designate a single person for editing? (by the way, using google docs is not a feasible solutions for us, for several reasons)

[Chris_Hofer]

I guess I would not recommend that you have two or more people working on the same content page at the same time.  You're just going to run into unwanted issues if you are all trying to save your own edits separately.  If you can coordinate your schedules so that your'e not all editing a page at the same time, that will be the best option for all involved.  Canvas does have a way to restore previous versions of "Pages" only (not assignments, discussions, etc.), but that still only brings back the times that a page was last saved.  How do I view the history of a page in a course?