Copying Discussion Forum Posts From One Course to Another

[manish_tripathi]

Hello.

Sorry if this has been addressed elsewhere or if I'm not seeing a feature that is already available in Canvas, but can Canvas/Instructure consider adding a feature to allow a course builder to copy (using the Copy feature or some other feature) discussion board forums from one course to another or even copying a forum post to another forum within the same course (without having to manually copy and paste from one forum to another)?

This would be very helpful because my team has a course in which we introduce ourselves, and right now, my team members have to manually copy and paste their introduction post from one forum to another because we don't use the forum from last year/semester when we start a new course every year, or semester to semester.

Thanks.

[Chris_Hofer]

@manish_tripathi ...

You should be able to do this already by selecting specific content in a course to import from one course to another.  Here's the Guide that you'd want to use:

How do I select specific content as part of a course import?

Do you think this will help for your needs?

[manish_tripathi]

But what about if we are using the same course shell from semester to semester?

[Chris_Hofer]

@manish_tripathi ...

When using the course import tool using the link that I shared with you earlier, instead of specifying a different course, you could specify the same course that you're already in (the one that has your discussion topics).  Canvas will alert you that you are trying to copy content in a course that you're already logged in to, but that's perfectly fine.  It should make a copy of the discussion topic for you.

If you wanted to test this in your school's Canvas "test: environment before doing it in your school's "production" environment, you can do this, too.  Your "production" environment is the environment that you typically log in to on a daily basis.  The "test" environment is a separate environment that you can use to test things out without disrupting anything in the "production" environment.  Just make sure you log out of the "test" environment before returning to your "production" environment.

• What is the Canvas test environment?
• How do I access the Canvas test environment as an instructor?
• How do I log out of Canvas as an instructor?

On a side note...and I know this isn't what you were asking about...but I was curious to why you're using the same course shell from semester to semester.  Typically, new course shells are used each semester to keep students separated by semester...and make things a bit more manageable from term to term.  I'm sure you and your school have reasons for the way you have things configured (not saying there's anything wrong with what you are doing), so I was just curious more than anything.

I hope my above information for copying discussions will be helpful to you.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @manish_tripathi,

If you're talking about copying discussion replies (which I think is what you mean), that's not really possible in Canvas at this time as far as I know.  For something like an "Introduce yourself", the teacher could include their own info as part of the discussion prompt, but then students would have a harder time replying to that in an organized way.  I think copy/pasting or just making a post with new current info each time the course taught are really the best ways to go for this.

-Chris

[manish_tripathi]

Correct. Copying and pasting is what my team is doing right now and I was trying to see if there was another way. Thanks for the reply.