Need to preserve the course dates after blueprint association

[ShantanuWaW]

Hello, 

we are running into the issue where the course dates are overridden once the blueprint is associated for the first time. 

Is there a way to preserve the course dates that are already in the course? This issue only happens when the course is associated for the first time. 

Any insight will help. Thank you 

[Chris_Hofer]

@ShantanuWaW ...

I recall a similar situation happening when I was a Canvas admin back in Wisconsin.  We were piloting some blueprint courses, and our "parent" blueprint course (which, I believe, was also a "master" course) didn't have any dates filled in within the course "Settings" screen.  When that blueprint course was associated with any "child" courses that had been populated by our SIS (and also included start and end dates), those dates were wiped out because of the blueprint sync.  If I recall correctly, we had to go back into these "child" courses and manually re-populate the start/end dates for those courses based on what was in our SIS.  Thankfully, we only had a few blueprint courses with a handful of "child" courses associated with them...but it still was some extra work we hadn't anticipated.

[ShantanuWaW]

Chris, I am so thankful for your reply ! 

You are describing the exact issue we are going through. Our SIS has already created bunch of courses that also have really precise start and end dates and they are getting wiped out. If there is no other solution but to update those again, we might need to devise some automated process for it. 

Hoping that Canvas looks into preserving the child course dates after association.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @ShantanuWaW,

I'd suggest submitting this as a feature idea, so that Instructure can officially take a look and perhaps adjust this in the future.  There's no guarantee that they'll make a change, as some people may actually prefer the current behavior, but that would be the official way to have this considered.

Hope this helps a bit!

-Chris