We're experimenting with Blueprint courses and I'm trying to find the best way to manage template courses.

The documentation lists the SIS_ID as the required ID to make an association. But, we don't create empty classes in our SIS for blueprints.We would like to use a manually-created and shared course to make those changes to keep our SIS and LMS data segmented.

I went ahead and made a courses.csv from the admin panel to grab a subaccount and noticed the "blueprint_course_id" field didn't specify which was necessary. I tried it with a Canvas course ID and no luck, which makes sense. My current plan is to use a courses CSV from the admin reports to grab all of the upcoming Course IDs and then use a script to read from that and associate via the API.

I'm wondering if anyone else is using a similar method - not creating Blueprint shells from the SIS - to manage these master classes. What do you do differently? Is there a better way to make these associations?