Templates and Duplicate Items

[BradThames]

Hello - 

My university is in the process of migrating to Canvas and we're developing templates for each program, but we're not sure about the best way to implement them. The easiest, of course, would be to set a course shell as a template within each program level so that it gets applied automatically whenever a course is created in that level. The concern I have is that each semester, when new courses are created and the template applied, instructors will then import the content from the previous semester's course that already used the template, resulting in a lot of duplication.

For example, suppose the template has a Homepage, a hidden module with instructor resources, and a module with student resources. An instructor customizes the Homepage in the Fall semester. In the Spring, a new version of the course will be created with the template (incluidng those items), so when she imports the content from the Fall course, there will be two versions of the Homepage ("Home" and "Home-1", e.g.), and duplicates of all the instructor and student resources. And the next Fall there will be 3 versions, and so on.  So I can imagine things getting really messy over time. 

Does anyone have a good method of avoiding this problem when using templates (aside from just reminding instructors to clean up after every import)?  

[Michael_17 · Accepted solution]

I work as an eLearning Support Specialist for a university using Canvas. We have a team that designs templates for each course and prior to a term creates copies for the instructors of those courses.

ex: MATH_101_template would become May_2022_MATH_101_xxxx where the x's distinguish one class from another. 

The course templates have a lesson plan already within them and leaves certain sections blank for the instructor to setup prior to the term start. Home pages, instructor and student resources are included already. The instructor would just update pre-built pages that we've outlined in the instructor pre-term setup to tailor it to their course. 

- If the instructor is importing content that does not already exist in the new course, make sure they choose 'Select specific content' (image attached) to avoid creating duplicate content or accidentally overwriting something they shouldn't. They would then go to the Modules page to add the new content to whichever Module they want it to pair with. 

- If the instructor is updating an existing page, they would just copy / paste material on a page.

The templates are adjusted from term to term depending on the needs of each course. If the template doesn't change , then we just use the existing template and create a new copy for the current term (ex: June_2022_MATH_101_xxxx). 

This is just how our institution handles courses term to term, but you can tailor these templates to your instructors needs. You could have templates setup for each instructor for a course if they stick with the same subject (ex: John_Doe_MATH_101_template). 

[BradThames]

Thank you! It's good to hear how you do things. 

I was anticipating that we may have to instruct faculty on how to selectively import from previous terms to avoid creating duplicates, but I'm not sure how reliable they will be with that. I guess  we'll see! 

[sjones11]

We implemented a standard template based on 41 modules named for each week of school.  We thought it was a great idea until this year when we realized what the OP @BradThames did prior to implementation.  🙂  It seems the only good solution is what @Michael_17 suggests and instruct teachers to import Specific Content and not the entire course at once which would definitely become a mess.  I have read that if the modules were named exactly the same, that would not be an issue, but with the dates changing year-to-year this isn't an option for us.