IMSCC File Issue: "Import Error: Assignment"

[mikekaiman1]

Is anybody else getting a weird message when important an IMSCC file into a new course?  While it says there is an import error (see pic attached) all the assingments and activities come through and are visible to both teachers and students.  Thoughts?  Thanks in advance.

[chriscas]

Hi @mikekaiman1,

I haven't had any reports of errors like that form my university...  Can I ask where the imscc file is coming from?  Is it an exported file form another Canvas course, from a publisher, other LMS, or some other source?  Knowing the source might help to narrow down the possible causes of the error.  If everything appears to work, maybe it's something that can be ignored, but as a computer science person myself I hate seeing weird messages and always want to figure out the cause and hopefully get Instructure to fix things!

-Chris

[mikekaiman1]

Chris,

I work for the Federal Reserve bank of St. Louis and we use canvas to connect as an LTI to our online activities in www.econlowdown.org.  The imscc file is coming from a course I built in canvas with external tool activities connected to that LTI.  I want to share these imscc files with other high school teachers and was beta testing to make sure everything worked when the error message popped up.  I've tried old imscc files, new imscc files in our domain so I know it's nothing I did when I built them in the past several weeks as they all give me the same error message BUT still function normally when I assume a teacher or student role.  Very odd.  I appreciate the help.

--Mike

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @mikekaiman1,

Thanks for the extra details.  Do you're exporting a Canvas course to a file, downloading that file, then going to a different course shell in the same Canvas environment and importing that file, right?

Since you mentioned the assignments are an LTI tool, can you tell us is the LTI is installed at the course level (you put it in an individual course shell yourself), or if an administrator installed it at an account level, making it available in all of your courses by default?  I wonder if perhaps something in the LTI config is a bit off (even though ti works) and that's somehow causing the error message to appear in the import process.

I would suggest submitting this issue to Canvas support if you can, even while we do a bit more info exchange here.  If this is repeatable, they should be able to get a ticket created for their engineering team to eventually dig deeper and hopefully resolve the issue (or tell you exactly what is broken with the import and how to fix it).

-Chris

[mikekaiman1]

Chris,

To your points:

1. The LTI in our course shell is at the account level and is preloaded into any course I create by default.  

2. To confirm I am creating the course in canvas, exporting the imscc file, creating a brand new empty class and getting the error when importing the file.

3. To make matters even more strange I just had a colleague do the same process, and she did not get any import errors AND all the assignments work.  

I'm assuming that others outside of the organization would also not get any import errors as well based on that last point.  Could this just be a single instance of the way I am just logged in?

I will investigate opening a ticket and I sincerely appreciate all the help.

--Mike

[chriscas]

Hi @mikekaiman1,

That's definitely weird.  I wouldn't have expected another user to get no error with the same file you see an error with.  Imports generally seem to (frustratingly for me as an admin) not always respect permissions to avoid errors, but it would be interesting to know if the other person has the exact same role in the course (and/or admin account) as you.  Let us know what support tells you about this!

As for other people, if they are using your Canvas instance with the LTI pre-installed at the account level, i'd expect the import to be fine.  If people are using another Canvas instance, the experience may vary depending whether they have the LTI configured or not (and how it works, sometimes LTI assignments all need to be re-linked when in a different environment).

-Chris