Root account announcement settings?

[TabithaLoveSCC]

Hello everyone, as admin we are evaluating announcements and we would prefer to set the account default for course shells to 1) display the latest announcements on the course homepage and 2) allow student replies.

We encourage our faculty to use these settings to help , but would like new faculty/adjuncts to intentionally opt out of these settings rather than trusting they find where to enable them in each course. Is there any way to change these settings? (The closest I found is a way to enforce disabling comments, but not the opposite.) 

Thanks!

[chriscas]

Hi @TabithaLoveSCC,

You should be able to use the Course Templates feature to do this.  You can setup a course with whatever defaults you'd like, and then set that course as the template for your root/subaccount.  Any new courses created after that point will essentially inherit the template course content and settings, but the instructor can change anything they want after that.

-Chris

[tbailey8121]

Thank you, interesting thought!

Our instructors normally import courses from prior terms; would this not just overwrite the course settings from a template for most classes again?

[chriscas]

Hi @tbailey8121,

Yes, my understanding is that imports would override template settings (but not content).  I thought the templates might work because @TabithaLoveSCC  mentioned the target audience being new faculty, who probably don't have a course to import.  You could probably write a script to crawl through all of your courses and set options via the API, but then you may have faculty upset if you're changing their already developed courses.  I think you'd run into those same complaints if this because some kind of account option too, so I think it's almost a no-win situation for everyone involved :(.

-Chris