[Groups] Copy Group Settings

[donaldjo]

Group settings should be included when doing a course copy or Import.

I have a course which relies heavily on an intricate set of groups tied to assignments (it's a negotiations course) so I need to be able to copy the course over from term to term in complete form. Currently whenever I copy the course, the groups are all lost, as well as the tying of groups to the appropriate assignments. Re-creating the groups and then re-tying them to assignments takes an incredible amount of time.

Comments from Instructure

The Canvas Production Release Notes (2015-06-27) indicate that importing a course with group assignments now brings the group assignment settings to the new course; however, upon testing the group structures within a group set do not come with it.  For this reason we will keep this feature idea open for voting.  We will continue testing and update this post as soon as we have more information.

Course Settings and Grading Schemes

Importing Course Settings from a Canvas course export package also imports the grading scheme.

Explanation: When a user imported selective course content from a Canvas export package, the grading scheme was not included in the import. Importing the entire course was not affected. This behavior occurred because Canvas was not verifying grading standard copies if it was part of selected content. Canvas code has been updated to import the course grading scheme when part of selected course content.

[dschober]

Looking forward to an update on this.  It seems that the last comment from an Instructure employee was a year ago, from a now deactivated account.   @Renee_Carney ​ or Deactivated user​, anyone from your group still considering this?  It would be a great improvement to lessen the setup time for many instructors/designers.

[lucas_faule]

Hi Dave, how do you think it's the better approach to do this idea be considered again?

Thanks.

[lgaughan]

Our school creates templates and copys to each section, when courses are using groups is often very time consuming an extra work (which was already created in the template) to have to go back and reset the groups function. This needs to be fixed!

[Renee_Carney]

Dave.

This idea has not been picked up again.  It still remains in archive.

[ujones]

We would LOVE to see this implemented soon. Many of our courses use Groups, and setting them up for each section each term is very time consuming. 

One trick that we have found to be helpful is to create the Group Sets in the destination shell before you copy the content. When you do, the assignments will automatically link to the correct Group Set. The titles must be identical for this to work. 

[hockin]

 @Renee_Carney ‌, I work with  @lgaughan ‌ and the group structures are pretty complex.  In one course, the group set is divided up by topic.  The Groups named are designates of the topics to examine in depth.  This is very time consuming to recreate in multiple courses. 



#group sets‌! need to import into the destination!

[lucas_faule]

Thank you very much @Ursula Jones for you "trick". I've tested and it worked very well!!! We designed an automatic way to do this via API. So, we create a course, look for groups sets created in master course, then we create these groups sets in the destination course (exactly as in master course), and finally, we throw a content migration job that imports content from master course to destination course. All groupable activities in destination course remain configured as in master course. It was really helpful your advice.

Thanks.

[lgaughan]

It's essentially still time consuming because you still need to set up the groups. It does assist in cutting out the step of going into each assignment and re-linking it to the particular group but you still have to create the groups in the designated area.  @hockin ‌ has anyone in COHLIT tested this yet? 

[sterling_lyon]

PLEASE add a clone group set with an option to send to another course! Or as stated in the comments above. We use the same groups with the same group membership for two years. It would be so nice to be able to set these up more quickly in the future. 

[vrs07nl]

From this i see that there are complicated work arounds ( e.g. create group shells in a new course before copy over course content and group assignment) etc- all manual and time consuming . The new blueprint (master and children option) does not copy group set ups or content either. So i still  have to create say 36 separate groups, manually create all the content in EACH one and manually add students to them (if self-enrol or csv file not an option) 

My wish list re groups is 

a) the ability to create content etc in one group and then be able to copy it in ONE go to other groups in that set 

b) the ability to copy group set ups and ALL group content to another course 

i.e the option to clone within a course and copy set ups across different courses would be the perfect solution 

see also

Copy group content within and across courses