Auto-Publish Courses

[morgan_j]

I am wondering if anyone has a process to bulk auto-publish Canvas courses?  We would like to have all courses in a particular term set to "Published" instead of relying on the instructor to perform this function before a class starts.

I am not a programmer, so any guidance and steps/details on how I could accomplish this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Jeff Morgan

[pklove]

This would be quite straightforward.  Something like:

Get the list of courses using Accounts - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation the enrollment_term_id can be used to restrict the list to just one term, and you can also exclude already published courses with the published parameter.

Then, for each course, you use Courses - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation to publish the course.  This can be done with either the offer parameter, or course[event]=offer

[morgan_j]

pklove‌, thank you for your response to my question.  I will look into this to see if I can get this to work.

[bneporadny]

Hey jmorgan,

I handle this two different ways for my institution. 

The first way is upon creating  the course using #Courses - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation I set offer flag to true. 

The second way is I utilize the #unpublish course‌ report and if the course is within a 5 day window of term start and has been set to be unpublished by the instructor I go ahead and auto publish the course for them again.  This process runs once daily and has caught many a course that an instructor has gone in and unpublished after we had already published the course for them to begin with. 

Brian

[morgan_j]

 @bneporadny ‌, thanks for your help with this.  Going to begin working on this in hopes that I can get it to work correctly.

[bneporadny]

jmorgan‌, Let me know if you have any questions as you're working through this. I will be glad to answer any questions I can.

[morgan_j]

 @bneporadny ‌, thank you.  I definitely will do that!

[kona · Accepted solution]

jmorgan, here’s the non programmer approach to doing this - How to list teachers who have published/unpublished courses - skip straight to option 3 and it also includes a way to publish the courses. 🙂

[morgan_j]

 @kona ‌, thank you!  I have some of our programmers working on the API method, but I am going to try this method that you suggested on our Canvas test instance.  This is great news!  

[morgan_j]

Just a quick update that I have yet to try what  @kona  suggested, but am going to try it this week.  I will update this post once I have any results.  Thanks!

[kona]

Yes, please let us know how it works!

[morgan_j]

 @kona ‌, thanks again for the information to get our courses bulk published.  Here are the results of using option #3:

• I ran this on our test system first
• I had over 2,500 courses for our Fall term that I wanted to test this on
• On the first attempt to publish courses, the script ran for 6 minutes and I received an error that stated "Exceeded maximum execution time".  Even though I received this message, I noticed that it published approximately 1,400 courses for the term.
• I went through the process again, and the second run finished publishing the remaining 1,100 courses.

So, this definitely works!  I am guessing due to timeout issues, you may receive the error I received, but just need to run through the process again to complete.  A huge thanks to  @James ‌ for his work on this and the documentation!

[kona]

jmorgan, excellent! I appreciate you coming back to share your experience and I'm really happy it worked for you! 

[James]

jmorgan,

Google Sheets has a timeout of 5 minutes that I can't do anything about. I'm glad you just retried it and found that it worked. Thanks for coming back and sharing the success for people who might have had the same situation or question.