Wrong course copied in my present course.

[AnaLu2]

I was supposed to copy in my actual Chemistry I course a file sent from my academic coordination, but instead I copied my Chemistry II course from the last semester which does not matches with the one I had to copy. How can I undo or eliminate or cancel this Chemistry II course copied into my Chemistry I course? Can I do it or administration credentials are needed? Is it an action a professor cannot carry on?

I have downloaded de correct file into my computer but now the option of uploading this kind of file does not appear anymore.

Help!

Ana Luisa Luna

[paul_fynn · Accepted solution]

Hi @AnaLu2 stuff happens !!

The next steps depend on whether you are in a managed environment and how yout Canvas admin manages course creation.

The quick option for them would be to create a crosslist of one, which will archive your old site and give you an empty site.

You can then import correctly, which saves deleting all thE old content from your import.

Unfortunately Canvas built in purge creates aan entirely new shell which will no longer link to teh SIS - a purge button would be a useful alternative.

Good luck !

[paul_fynn · Accepted solution]

Hi @AnaLu2 stuff happens !!

The next steps depend on whether you are in a managed environment and how yout Canvas admin manages course creation.

The quick option for them would be to create a crosslist of one, which will archive your old site and give you an empty site.

You can then import correctly, which saves deleting all thE old content from your import.

Unfortunately Canvas built in purge creates aan entirely new shell which will no longer link to teh SIS - a purge button would be a useful alternative.

Good luck !

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @AnaLu2,

Just one slight correction (in my experience) to @paul_fynn's reply.  If you have the "reset course" option available under course settings, clicking that button should give you a completely new/blank Canvas shell to start over.  It *should* also move all of the student enrollments to that new shell, or at least it does in our Canvas instance.  Paul, does that actually function differently for you?

-Chris

[paul_fynn]

Hi @chriscas , I think that the forum is extremely useful in so far as it confirms that there is no universal view of how Canvas is implemented or managed across different institutions, institutional types and national educational systems, which puts us all on notice that the support and advice that we give should always be considered both partial and conditional.

Implementation of any LMS is a big ask for any institution, and whilst we might like to imagine that at institutional level (and indeed below) local teams responsible for making the complex links between their local Student Information System and Canvas have stuck to the grand design and functionality envisaged by Instructure, the forum is revealing differences, certainly in our case. That isn't a complaint or criticism - like the bumble bee, the wonder of SIS integrated LMSs is not that they fly well but that they fly at all.

Philosophically I would suggest that LMSs have always been more oriented to the hobbyist/bricoleur teacher-enthusiast, offering them maximum flexibility (the principle of requisite variety) which may not be operationally suitable, provide a consistent student experience, nor meet inclusion and regulatory requirements in a way that a narrower set of templates and tight integration might do (principle of preferred patterns).

In our case our specialist teams have implemented a series of tightly coupled SIS integrations which are highly effective in controlling course provisioning, assignments, due dates, mitigations etc., but the cost of this is that they appear to operate using processes that run in parallel to Canvas, rather than through the suite of API integrations.

So the answer to the question is that our central team have determined that we shouldn't have access to the native delete or refresh button (ie we don;t see it at all), and I can only see this being revisited as and when the resources are available to further fine tune the parallel systems and processes - unlikely in the UK HEI context right now.

The discussion is useful, as your insights are showing where we might be able to move some of our operational load from bespoke parallel systems back to take more advantage of the native functionality.

[chriscas]

Hi @paul_fynn,

I totally agree with your statement what there are hardly any universal truths when it comes to Canvas and how it is used/implemented at different schools/institutions across different countries.  This is something I have definitely seen many examples of over the years and try to keep in mind when posting on here, but even then I will get surprised often at things that I thought were a little more universal still not being true.  That is actually why I had asked about the reset button for your case, as I was surprised that using it may break some of your processes.

On this particular issue, we do not make the reset button available to faculty/teachers because we had too many cases early on where someone just hit the button for some reason and basically wiped out their whole course without meaning to.  We do have it available to our admins though, so in q case where a course does truly need to be reset (before the start of the term when a teacher changes, for example), an admin can hit the reset button at request of a faculty member and generate a brand new empty course shell with the course roster and SIS info intact.

As always these are great discussions to have in the community, they definitely have helped me gain valuable knowledge about Canvas and other systems and processes over the years!

-Chris

[paul_fynn]

Hi @chriscas - we have locally deprecated that function, the clue being in "clicking that button should give you a completely new shell" - the new shell and address are beyond the reach of our middleware and the effect would be to disassociate the course and content with the SIS.

We are pressing our in house developers for an alternative approach.

cheers

Paul

[chriscas]

Hi @paul_fynn,

It's interesting that your middleware is affected by the reset button.  The button does create a new shell, but it moves the sis_id to that new shell, and re-associates the section to it.  This action should basically be transparent to process utilizing sis=import in Canvas.  Your middleware must be doing something much more advanced using the API and referencing internal Canvas course identifiers?

-Chris