[ARCHIVED] Blueprint Courses as Curriculum Repository

[amariano]

Hello all,

Next year, we're looking to use Blueprint courses to host our curriculum. So for example, we would have a blueprint course for Geometry and then that Blueprint would feed all Geometry courses, including honors and college prep. At the beginning of the year, the blueprint would be linked to the sections for the course syncing down only.

The issue is that as we develop this blueprint, we would love to have two.....The top level would be the MASTER district blue print that only a small group of folks have rights to. This is where the master curriculum would reside including teacher resources  and modules containing units with assignments, outcomes,  content etc.

 In the first year as we develop the curriculum, we would like the Geometry teachers to be able to collaborate on a Blueprint course, contribute their content to it. Then meet as a curriculum review team and decide what gets pushed up to the District Blueprint for use the following year.

As far as we know, we can't have nested Blueprints, levels of content. We've used master courses the last two years but we've had a tough time with them.. (teachers leave mid-year and unlinking from the gradebook is a nightmare.)

Does anyone have any thoughts on doing this most efficiently? It would nice to not have to link and unlink Blueprints and stop using master courses.

[gulick_24]

Hi Ann, I asked a similar question when setting up blueprint this fall for my college-level courses. I have one course but in-person and online sections, and the content is 90% the same, so I had originally planned to (using the language from the Canvas tutorial videos) have a "grandparent" course will all the content for in-person and online versions. That grandparent course would blueprint to two "parent" courses, which each would syncs to the 30 or so "child" sections.  However, nesting them like this (grandparent/parent/child) is not a feature currently available, so I ended up creating a master course with ALL the content in it, copy it over to a second master course. Now I had two copies of the same course, so I deleted all the online-course-content from one of the masters, and vice versa for the other one. Then I converted each master course to a blueprint parent, and associated the child courses with one master or the other, as appropriate. Remember how 90% of the content is the same? This means I end up making most of the edits/updates to both masters, but I can still make online-only or in-person-only changes to just the specific master I want.  Although doing changes twice is sometimes a pain, it's a heck of a lot better than coordinating instructors to make the changes to their 30+ sections. All in all, blueprint has been amazing, and I wanted to share how I set it up in case it's helpful for your situation.

Your comment about instructors wanting to add content to the master course sounds like something in Commons could be helpful for your team to look in to.  Teachers could add content to it whenever they wanted, and you can then grab that to put in the blueprint master course and sync to to sections (as least that's how I understand it could work). I haven't used it yet myself but it's on my list to start using very soon! Good luck Ann!