How do I move courses out of a root account into another root account?

[cxlim]

So our canvas instance has a few accounts. However I am only an admin of each account, and not a global admin.

I was asked to move courses from: example.instructure.com/accounts/2

into: example.instructure.com/accounts/3

So I can let each account admin manage their own account and its subaccounts. Is this possible? Thanks!

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @cxlim,

That's definitely something you should be able to do, with some caveats.  Mainly, it's important to know if the courses are being created (and/or updated) by an SIS integration.  If the answer to that is yes, that integration may undo everything you do when it runs.

Assuming your SIS doesn't override things, you could do this by going into the settings area of each course and changing the account the course lives in.  If you have a fairly small number of courses, that's probably what I would do.  Otherwise, you could do this in bulk by either using the Canvas API or having your root admin do SIS CSV uploads (since you're not the root admin, this will not be available to your directly).

Hope this helps a bit!

-Chris

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @cxlim,

That's definitely something you should be able to do, with some caveats.  Mainly, it's important to know if the courses are being created (and/or updated) by an SIS integration.  If the answer to that is yes, that integration may undo everything you do when it runs.

Assuming your SIS doesn't override things, you could do this by going into the settings area of each course and changing the account the course lives in.  If you have a fairly small number of courses, that's probably what I would do.  Otherwise, you could do this in bulk by either using the Canvas API or having your root admin do SIS CSV uploads (since you're not the root admin, this will not be available to your directly).

Hope this helps a bit!

-Chris

[cxlim]

Thanks Chris! I will find out. I believe we do have a SIS integration?

The issue I have is that I can only see the dropdown option for "Sub-account:" but not "account" (hopefully I got the terminology right)

If i were to have the root admin do that does that affect the courses as they are currently live and on-going? Thanks!

Attached a screenshot.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @cxlim,

Subaccount is the term they seem to use on the course settings page, but it really is just whatever account (root or sub) the course lives in.  Looking at your screenshot, I see one other wrinkle that I didn't think about though.  Your courses appear to be using blueprints.  In that case, it's important that the course is in the same account or a subaccount of wherever the blueprint course is.  So if the blueprint is in subaccount A, and you move the course to subaccount B (not under subaccount a), that will likely break the blueprint functionality.  If your blueprint courses are all in the root account, you should be okay to move the courses anywhere though.  Just wanted to point this out for completeness and to avoid possible issues!

-Chris