Duplicating assignments, but retaining class assignments/times

[DarynWilliams1]

A couple of other people have asked this, and there hasn't been an answer other than a "yeah, me too", so here it goes.

I have a problem on the board that I give at the beginning of every class.  I want the students to turn in their answers in Canvas so I can give them the participation credit, and so I can capture writing samples. 
I set up the assignment as online text box submission.  I differentiate the open times so they can't start early, and the due times so that if they haven't turned it in by 10 minutes after the class starts, I can see that.  Since it is only for the beginning of class, I don't want them dragging it out throughout the class, but if a student comes in late, I will often tell them to do the problem when we're in individual work time.

When I copy the assignment so I can change the day and use it as a template for the next day, there is no differentiation information in it, so I have to go back through and type it all in.  There is no advantage to using the copy tool since 90% of the information that I need to copy is the differentiation info.

Is there a way to make a "Class time" differentiation template?  The dates and assignments could change, but not the available time, due time, and until time for each class.

The ideal workflow would be:

1. Copy a generic assignment from my Sandbox to my Course -- This would have all of the bones of the assignment (instructions, questions, formatting, etc.), but would have no information in the "Assign" section
2. Change the assignment name in the Course -- Makes sense to have a specific assignment name now instead of "Generic Assignment Copy"
3. Apply a due date to the assignment -- The times and specific classes aren't assigned yet, but the date is filled in the assignment "Available From" "Until" and "Due"
4. Apply a class/time differentiation template -- Now the "Assigned To" classes get filled in from the template and the assignment "Available From" "Until" and "Due" times are added
5. Publish the assignment

Steps 4 & 5 are interchangeable, or could be performed in the same step.  The larger issue is if I have 6 sections of the same course, copying a daily assignment is incredibly labor intensive, and almost not worth the trouble.

[DarynWilliams1]

Another way this might be accomplished is similar to the way a calendar appointment is recurring.  All of this would be "in a perfect world" and may not be compatible with the architecture behind Canvas.  It would be cool if it was though.

• Since I have this daily assignment, I could select "Recurring Assignment". 
• Canvas would then query if you wanted to copy by frequency or number of occurrences.   
  • If you choose "Frequency", the query becomes something like: every day, every week, every XX number of days, etc. 
  • If you select "Number of Occurrences" the query becomes "How many occurrences?" and you'd have to assign dates for each individual occurrence. 
• Canvas could query what information you want to make "sticky" in the "Assign" section. 
• Canvas could reference the original assignment in the title, and the default name could be "copy of ...", or there would be an opportunity to rename each occurrence right there.  

Even if I went back and changed details about the assignment after the copies were made, all the important stuff would have been copied.  Just some ideas for the programmers.

[ngarimella1]

@DarynWilliams1 Thank you for explaining your use case and the workflow you use. 

I racked my brain to see if there were alternate solutions available. I considered Canvas Commons (Commons Video Guide ) but since the one part that you want to preserve is availability and until dates, it comes up short. Due to the nature of Commons, you add a resource to Commons it preserves content but strips the dates for portability. 

You may consider creating a new request in our Ideas and Themes space. (How do I create a new idea conversation in the Instructure Community?) to share your use case, workaround, and suggestion with our product development teams.