If you intend to reuse some, or all, of the content from a previous semester in your upcoming semester's course shell, this Weekly Tip can provide you with some helpful tips to save time and effort.
If you are wondering about the basics of how to copy or reuse content from previous courses, this Weekly Tip covers the topic in depth: https://help.ithaca.edu/TDClient/34/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=1274
Tips for Copying Your Canvas Course
Pro Tip: Because it will make extra work for you if you plan to reuse your course content in future semesters, a vital principle to remember when building your course is to avoid putting dates in the titles of pages or assignments, if possible. Students will see relevant dates when they access these assignments or look at their calendar, so this step is generally not necessary and makes extra work for you renaming these assignments later when course dates shift between semesters.
1. Delete unused or necessary items before copying your Canvas course into a new course shell
If you perform a complete import of an old Canvas course, it will copy everything, including any unused pages you may currently have. Consider cleaning up any unnecessary items before you duplicate - this may include drafts of pages or assignments, or any leftover pages from an Ithaca College blueprint template.
2. Use the 'Adjust dates' feature to bulk-update your course dates
One of the most time-consuming processes when importing a Canvas course is manually editing the dates for all assignments, etc., to be accurate for the current semester. There is a feature than can quickly help you get most of your course dates close (you may have to manually adjust a few, but they should be 'in the ballpark'.)
When importing a Canvas course, you can choose to "adjust" your course dates by checking the box next to "Adjust events and due dates."
With this "Adjust Dates" feature, you can bulk-update your course dates to the new semester.
This feature works by calculating and applying the number of days between the beginning and end dates of your previous course, and those of your current course, to all the dates in your course.
Keep in mind that you need to look up and use the dates of the first day of class for each semester. Take care not to use the default (the day the Canvas course was created) or else you will get an incorrect calculation.
For instance, if you taught a Spring 2022 course that began on Tuesday, January 25th, 2022, and you plan to import all your course content into the shell of your Fall 2022 course that begins on Tuesday, August 23rd, you will enter those two dates into the "Beginning Date" fields, and the same for the end dates.
If your respective courses start on different days of the week, you can set "Substitution Dates" so that all course dates from one day of the week shift to another day, e.g, Mondays to Tuesdays, etc. To do this, click the "+ Substitution" button. Then choose the day of your previous course with the one it is associated with in the new course.
You can add as many of these as necessary.
This can save a lot of time, but it may not be perfect, so you'll have to double-check and manually edit any that are not a perfect fit.
For additional information on this process, please visit the following resource:
https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-adjust-events-and-due-dates-in-a-course-import/ta-p/1090
If you don't do this process during your course import, you can still bulk-update your assignment dates later in the assignment settings.
For more on this process, visit the following resource:
https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-bulk-update-due-dates-and-availability-dates-as-an/ta-p/1195
3. Clean up your old announcements
If you copy your course over, you will also get any announcements from your Canvas course, and they will be "Published" in the new course.
Make sure either to delete or change the posting dates for these copied announcements before publishing your course. Otherwise, students will receive all the old announcements at the beginning of the semester, because their dates will still be in the past.
If you wish to batch delete after importing, you can delete multiple announcements by checking the box on the right next to more than one and then clicking the "Delete" button at the top.
If you want to reuse any announcements and automate them to post later in the semester, you can also use the Delay Posting tool. This will give you time to edit the announcement prior to its posting date. For more information on this, visit this resource: https://help.ithaca.edu/TDClient/34/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=1272
4. Clean up your old quizzes
As with announcements, any quizzes that are left over from the previous semester will be left published in the new course, because their dates will still be in the past.
Make sure you either delete or un-publish all quizzes prior to the start of the semester. There is currently no batch delete option for quizzes.