Building Consistency: Leveraging Canvas Commons, Blueprint Courses, and Course Templates

Hi. Welcome. Thank you so much for coming to our session on, we and I wanna be very clear about this attempt to create a consistent student experience across our courses using Canvas comments, blueprint courses, and course templates, among other strategies. I'm Jackie Wilkins. No. Sorry.

Okay. Name's a good person. That's us. I'm Aaron Vanish. I didn't know you were only gonna say your Oh, I didn't know I was supposed to introduce you.

Before the presentation, I was telling Aaron that I was gonna just like start telling fun facts about him to the is part of the introduction. Sure. Fair enough. So but his brother did used to play Captain Jacksparrow at Disney World, so that probably the best one I have. That's the funnest.

Yeah, for sure, the most fun. But anyways, we are joining you here from Chicago. We work at the Northwestern University School of Professional Studies. We're super pumped to be here in Colorado as I hope that you are too, in the beautiful nature. This is my third instructor con, but my first since twenty fifteen.

So my previous two were in Park City, was anyone else there in twenty fourteen and in twenty fifteen. Nice. We got a couple OGs in the house. Great. So, yeah, I'm happy to be back after after a long hiatus.

I worked at Northwestern that entire time. And Aaron has worked there almost as long as I have. Almost as long. Yeah. And also is at Park City, but didn't get the extra one in between.

So she she's special. Two park cities. Anyways, so, our school, the schools professional studies is one of, twelve schools at Northwestern. We work on the distance learning team, which puts, classes online and graduate undergraduate and professional programs. So these are the programs that our department oversees.

We partner with faculty in each of these programs. Sometimes we're an existing in person class and putting it online. Sometimes we're building a wholly new online course. Recently actually, we've been taking classes that were designed to be online and flipping them because we're going to start offering accelerated hybrid master's degree programs where students will come on campus They'll take two in person classes and one online course per quarter, and they'll get their master's degree in a year. So an exciting new project we're working on.

I like to say that there's kind of a lot of variety, and that's consistency component that we're aiming for is so important. Before I move on, though, Let's move on. Yes. So, as you guys probably know, well, I mean, you probably know, I mean, everyone's heard of Northwestern, especially the past couple of weeks, you know, but, being we know nothing about that, by the way. Being in a, like, large, old Arwan University means that sometimes the attitudes towards online are, not the best.

And so putting the reason like the why of this presentation is that for us having consistency in our processes and our course sites, instead of having those conversations about What do you want your course site to look like? And where should the policies go? And can you review the library resources for the ten thousandth time faculty director. We are able to free up our time to talk about what is the best for students How can we make sure that people are having a quality experience with online courses? How can we make sure that we're adding northwestern value? That people feel like they're they're getting their money's worth. Our tuition is expensive. It's expensive everywhere. So we really want the time we spend faculty and our own internal time brainstorming, working, doing whatever, to focus on creating more innovative learning experiences, not figuring out, you know, oh, should the policies go on the syllabus page or on a separate Canvas page or whatever? Wanna make those decisions, get them over with.

I'm gonna be able to update them easily using these features of Canvas, and that's something in a previous session I was in. Where people are talking about using the API to do, like, bulk edits to things. And that's something I've always been like, we can do that. We can do that. And then Canvas gives us once in a while that make us not have to do that.

And I'd like to take advantage of those impossible because I don't actually know how to use the AP I just really really want to. So if anyone can teach Aaron how to use the API later, you be a half night. And Please find him. Please find him. So a little bit about our process.

Oh, did I miss anything on that slide? It doesn't do well. Okay. I'm just stealing from the previous session I was in. Someone talked about just tying things back into the the making moments of the theme of the conference, our moments not having to figure out, oh, what do we need to fix? Because we realize it got broken forty five places, instead focusing on spending those moments doing more meaningful engaging things with faculty and intern students is didn't think of it. I just took it from the other presentation.

It's already getting here that 20s. So this is what process is supposed to look like. Every court, we work in a team, Aaron is an instructional technologist. I'm a learning signer. So the two of us might work with a faculty developer to develop an online course in a Canvas sandbox, a site that students will never see.

In the first quarter that it's taught, we copy that sandbox over to a course site. I'm sure many people follow exact same process. Very simple. Right? And then in the second quarter that it's hot, we go back to the sandbox, make any necessary changes because as we know, our best laid plans when they get in front of real people are not always the best laid plans, and we again copy that sandbox to the course site. Now, what I said about best laid plans, in real life, what actually happens here is that we develop the course in a sandbox, we copy the sandbox to a course site, and then the faculty just you know, ignores all our handy dandy training materials and our our reminder emails and everything like that.

And they say, but I just worked in my existing site to make the changes that I want, and I'm gonna move that on over to the course site. And then they continue in the next quarter, they do the same thing. Or, we're the school of professional studies, so we have a lot of practitioner faculty. The vast majority of our faculty are working in an adjunct role. They work in the field that their our degrees are offered in.

So the people that teach our courses change pretty often. We have a lot of people who either teach the other quarter, teach once a year, things like that. So what will happen is we'll develop the course, pop it in course site, a new faculty teaches the course, and then they fall into those same patterns. So that's a challenge for when we're trying to implement consistency, especially when we're trying to implement updates to our standard materials, in the course sites because if we have a process that is based on our ideal function where we go sandbox to course site, sandbox to course site. We can just update all the sandboxes, push those updates to the course sites, everybody's happy.

Why are we here to present at a conference. We have no, we've never solved a problem in our lives. But, when this real real life comes in. We, we run into a few more problems. Some of these things aren't a problem.

They're just necessary components of a course site, track school policies, similar assignment types. Every course is unique, but Many times, a group assignment is a group assignment in terms of its instructions, but for various reasons, everyone does them slightly differently. Nobody knows why. We could get them into a place where everyone can come from a same starting point, and then continue on to the part that's actually to their course. Erin has a lot of goals.

Support guides, again, you know, one of the LTIs or tools that you use. It gets a new user interface look. All of a sudden, any custom guides you made look outdated or the students can't find the button is because it changed shape or color, and you gotta go and fix that everywhere. And because, you don't have a lot of people to do that. You can get very out of date, very disjointed quickly.

And then we've got, as Jackie mentioned, the other ones, you got your development sandbox as well as random, previous course sites that people taught from in the past year or years or decades in some cases where you find legacy content has trickle its way in there, and nobody knows it's there until it becomes very obviously that something is broken. So I already showed you this slide, right? And so I just wanted to revisit it while it looks pretty and clean and fresh. And, now I'm gonna mess it up. So this here was my best attempt at creating a graphic to show what different types of standard materials have to go in each one of these types of course sites. So as you can see, the, the, let's start with the big box.

The yellow box is, stuff that goes in all of our course sites. So we have some standard, you know, university wide policy materials has to be up to date in every single course that we offer every quarter. Then the orange box over here on the left is graduate and undergraduate. Those are academic programs. They're for academic credit, professional development, in the red box, those have a totally different set of policies and procedures for students.

Then, of course, those blue around graduate and undergraduate, there are specific materials just for graduate and undergraduate. Now we get to the circles. Now, those are the programs that feel like it's important to have a consistent look and feel. Which it might surprise you that there's not that many of them. Sometimes it surprises me too when people are like, no, we really want our faculty to be able to do whatever they want and have created freedom.

And I'm like, do you? Okay. What? Like, how about like a limited amount of creative freedom? But so the circles are, separate templates that we've built out for each of the programs. And then, the lines that I drew over here mean that so those are our hybrid accelerated programs at the bottom, and then those have to match up to those their counterparts in online version. So this hot mess is just to show you that and I feel like probably many people in this room if you're in similar role to what we do. This is also the kind of ecosystem you're working with.

You know, you gotta get a lot of things to a lot of different places. Some of them overlap, some of them. Don't. There are different needs. There are different desires.

And so this is like what we're trying to manage. And keep adding my terrible sense of humor into things. This one, I don't think I stole. It's just like dad joke quality. We'll censor it since this you know, potentially K twelve environments too, seeing these as I would, oh, shoot moments.

Making moments. Oh, shoot moments. My brother's the actor, not me. Okay? I don't know what I'm doing. He took me to improv once.

It was terrible. So So we'll get into talking about, the Canvas tools that we've used to facilitate this process. But we wanted to start with well, not imagining it was real. Before Canvas introduced any of these tools, how did we manage this and what did we do? Because obviously there is a way to do this. It involves a lot of copy and pasting.

But, what did we do prior to the tools we're gonna talk about being introduced. Highlights of some of those before I get into the actual slider and just just go for it. Just go for it. Let's just go for it. So as many of you, and we actually still use some DIY templates.

We use the course template tool, but we also have a lot of Sandbox sites that we will just copy over. And implement template structure into a site without actually using sites. And then we have my favorite, like, most visited site courseite resources, which I tried to call the Steel stuff site, unsuccessfully. But, so it's named courseite resources, and it is exactly what it sounds like. It's a repository where we can just pull bits of code, visual things, standard policy tags, things like that, library guide links and put them into our courses without having to go and reinvent the wheel every time.

And This is kind of what Canvas comments is. And for people who had Canvas comments for many years, you probably never needed something like this. Yeah. We just got Canvas comments. I don't know why.

I was so excited about it. I've been when I was at those Park City instructor my god. Canvas comment sounds great. When are we getting it? And they were like, no. And then we just got it.

So We have it now. Yeah. We're very excited. That's that's why we're here. We're like kid that asked Santa for the same Christmas present, our entire childhood, and then finally got it when we were too old for it.

Some of some of the pitfalls and things like that, especially when you're using a repository that many people have access to and and can edit, and there is really not any natural version control of any kind and other than, like, view page history, you can find things being updated, technically, being updated, but not really knowing what was that changed when there's not really a a trail to follow. So Canvas comments, really. It's a it's a beautiful feature. And we know you've probably all had it for ten years, but we're really excited to respectful. Just give the sauce.

Give us our moment. Okay? So I'm gonna let Aaron who is has a much better understanding of all these canvas features than I do. Alright. Take over as he discusses how we actually implement to the Canvas tools to help out with this process. Attempted.

Attempted. Yes. You are -- Still work in progress. -- attempted. So blueprint courses are very cool, in that they allow somebody at a canvas admin level to kind of send content to many destinations and it'll all get there the exact same way.

That's that part's cool. So very useful for pushing out standard type things. Policies, kind of a helpful introductory guide to, like, a specific subject matter or something that everybody needs to know in, in a program that they're in, where it kind of breaks down, and I have yet to find a solution to this, but if anybody has some, we're here to take I'm stealing ideas all day. Is that when you have instructors who are maybe taking a little from here, a little from there to update their latest course site instead of going back to the the main site they're working from. You can be sending stuff to a destination that already has something like it there and then you get dash two dash three dash four redundant duplicate versions, and nobody knows where it is or why, which one's the original.

So if this is a common familiar story to you, I apologize. To be telling you the same thing over and over again. But that's where Blueprints hasn't worked as well for us as we we wanted it to and we're eager to find maybe we were gonna make some changes, using comments to, to augment that. Templates. I know Jackie's technically built more templates than I have, but, I'll read it's on the side.

So we, we were using this before templates existed in the way that we were just having a Canvas course site that nobody used except for our department, and people would just know to go and copy from that when they started building a new course site. This makes that step a little bit faster. It creates the course site with all that preconfigured a few less clicks, and everybody likes less clicks, I think. Maybe some people have a really nice mouse that they just wanna keep clicking. But for our undergraduate courses, which I can talk a little bit more about this.

Yeah. So our undergraduate courses, felt very strongly that they wanted to use the templates to place standardized content in courses. Whereas graduate and professional development programs feel that it's important that they're able to push current updates to as many courses as possible so that if I go back to a class that I took the previous quarter, it should have the current policies in it. I'm not saying I agree. I'm just saying that's how it is.

Our undergraduate courses feel that it's in important to have the policies captured as they were in the quarter that the course was designed. So the undergraduate courses place some standardized content, university resource policy information in addition to common page layouts for, undergraduate. For we have we're on the quarter system, so we have a ten module structure. So we have, ten modules built out in there and they each have one content page, one assignment, and one discussion in there. And the formatting in any of those pages can be copied to a different type of assignment, what if you're a quiz, you can copy the the visual formatting over.

So it's designed to be extremely flexible you know, there's no, no one is saying that by using this template, your course needs to have ten assignments and ten discussions. There are no point values assigned or anything like that. It's just that the visual standard is available to you. The undergraduate template also uses a consistent left hand navigation menu and that's one of the biggest things that we've heard is difficult for students, and that one of the biggest, like, points of contention in our office, to be honest. Like, I've often said, we should just, like, put everyone in a room and lock the door until we come to an agreement.

Like, no one's leaving until we agree on the navigation. I think it would just be more adventurous than user testing. Like, I That'll roll out. So, yeah. We'll just duke it out.

But anyways, our our undergraduate courses, we serve adult learners. And so obviously, it's important to respect any learner's time, any learner's cognitive load. But the people we serve typically are the students we serve are typically working full time, taking multiple classes. They're, you know, they're not people who are focusing on. This is their sole focus, and they have a bunch of time.

Not I mean, obviously, everyone's got stuff going on. But we just really need our courses to be efficient. So we want them to be able to spend their time focusing on the actual course content. And not, how to navigate the course. So that's why we feel like the visual style is reassuring and calming and shows that we care about them, that that we planned it this way.

So our new favorite feature, Canvas comments. So this is the one where, if you have the nice part about this, unlike blueprints, you don't have to have an admin access to be able to get the content into your course. Non admins can make edits to blueprints, but they can't do the synchronization. But comments, anybody can make an update to the resource, and anybody who has subscribed to that resource or imported to their course can know if that updates been made and bring it to their course. So that's that's super helpful.

And we envision that being helpful for faculty, for, directors of programs who maybe are enrolled in multiple course sites and need to to make make an update so that instructors don't have to do that themselves. It's also just gonna be useful for us because our very small department doesn't have to remember where did I leave that thing or did someone else update it and not remember to send a team's message to tell everybody that it changed, it's all tracked in comments. That's I'm just can't get enough of how how much how much just like overhead that eliminates from from my brain of trying to remember where all the things are, except and I think we'll get to it later. Comments doesn't tell you where you brought it in from. I haven't figured it out.

If anybody has a, like, a good, like, powerful workaround to that. Mine's just to put a link to the place I got the resource from in the description. I know his ideas for something better than I was talking last night of Right? It's like, is there an API call we could do? Nothing. But it's just you gotta remember where you got it from when you enrolled in five hundred courses remembering that kinda can hard. So just save yourself.

Make a note in the in the description of the commons resource when you when you do it, where did this come from? So you know where to go you when you need to update it. Yeah. One way we're really excited to use comments is, we're focusing as a department on, improving our students' capstone experience. Instances. Being a professional studies department, our capstone courses are crucial in terms of students, you know, developing work artifacts that they can show to potential employer on some of the capstone projects are real projects that they do with their current employer to prove that they're ready for a promotion.

But all of our capstone projects are truly designed to, bring all the knowledge in the program together. And so it's crucial that students are able to quickly revisit in the first couple weeks or even the couple weeks before the Capstone courses. The, the key findings, key assessments from their previous courses. One thing we're working with our faculty directors right now to use comments for is to put almost like program guides or like, do you remember pages in comments that we can update as the courses and curriculum change. You know, if you took this course before spring twenty twenty, one, you might have x, but if you took it after spring twenty twenty one, you probably why.

That we can update, push out those updates as our curriculum change, and have those be a really valuable resource to students in our capstone. So it's one way I'm really excited to be using it. We should be like a kin comments commercial, I think. But But they edited. Yeah.

There have to be some happy editing. Anyways, we also do some other stuff, not canvas tools. Yeah. Yeah. Again, before some of these resources existed, we've experimented with, considered using attempted to use other things, like setting up pages on a department website, where, you link out from Canvas so that students know to go and find a specific policy description there.

And, and to some extent, those things still exist when it's like a main university policy, but if there are things that are kinda unique to our school or to our programs, you know, leaving the Canvas user experience and having to come back gets kinda clunky, not to mention that none of us can actually change anything on our department website. We have to go through many, many steps. Maybe. All of you can publish a page on your department website, and that's really nice. But ours doesn't work that way.

And then file sharing, again, linking to a PDF fine, but pdfs don't have the, like, embedded media and things like that. So, again, breaking the Canvas user experience for students was just something we were trying to avoid. And then having course sites that students do at, like, an orientation level, sometimes things would be far too detail oriented at the point of being admitted to a program to make sense to tell them about it then. It made more sense to have it in the time and the place where they're actually in the course. So, again, trying to have everything where the students need it at the time they need.

Yeah. We really prioritize trying to have the information at the point of need for students. Course templates. Oh, I talked about this already. I forgot that.

Okay. So let me just look at the notes and make sure that Yeah. I think, you know, the big thing about, these course templates being, being in the sandbox is when they're created. So you can set for those of you who don't know about course templates. You go into any subaccount that you're an admin of, and you can set the template.

No users can be enrolled in a template course, which can make it a little difficult because there's a very limited pool of people that can update it. But you can set the, template for that entire subaccount. And every time you create a new course site within the subaccount, it's automatically created with the template that you populated it with. And this is great because sometimes, like, say we hired a new person and they they skimmed that part of their onboarding materials or, you know, say we have a really industrial faculty, and they wanna jump right in there and build their course site or more likely copy their old on ground course site into the new online course site. They will go in there and it will already be populated.

So it just removes that lag time for us to even if we had like a DIY template, it removes that lag time for us to get it into the course. So yes. I strongly recommend the use of course templates. I really enjoy them. The blueprint courses, Erin is our resident expert on blueprint courses.

Yeah. I think many of the things I I cover already. But, part of the bottom there, I think I didn't get into as as much in detail previously. It's just trying to find workarounds for what aren't really limitations of these tools, but become headaches for us of the kind of unusual way that we have to to implement them. So I don't know if anybody's scoured the Canvas community websites like I have and come across phrases like blueprint inception where, like, Blueprints can update Blueprints.

They can update Blueprints and see that's never gonna happen, which is probably a good thing. But we did figure out that common's gonna update blueprints. So unless There's some paradox that can happen there. Please tell me. I don't wanna get too invested in that theory.

But it so far has worked. So we'll see if that continues to work for us. Because then in a program like our data science program where we have, like, one lead instructor in many, like, peer instructors who are teaching the same course from the same sandbox, we could get all the sandboxes on the same page, and that just a few small groups of people making sure that they're communicating together and and still teaching from the same same course. So I got to add about that one. I mentioned earlier that that was my most important thing, but I feel like I discovered about Kamick's comments, and everyone else has known about it for eight years.

And that's just new to me. So, but yeah, I've I've already lost, like, three Canvas common resources because I don't know where from. So Yeah. But these are the type of resources that, we'll be using comments as I mentioned in our undergraduate courses, these are built into the Canvas course template. But for our other programs, we want to be able to things like our student media guide.

You know, some of our courses require students to create their own media while others do not. We don't want the student media guide in every course. I tried to figure out how to put this on that hot mess graphic that I, like, created before, and then it was just too much for one slide. But, you know, we don't want the student media guide in every course, and we have some other things like that where we do need to have standard info but it needs to be pulled in at the point of need. We don't want to be pushing it out to an entire, we don't want it to be part of a template, even because we don't want someone to have to to delete it.

We don't want it to be part of a blueprint because we don't want the content to be locked. We want to be able to use common so we can push them to individual courses. Oh, yeah. We have two more slides, conclusion and recommendations, and then we'll take questions. So we hope that this, you know, where this these attempts are still very much as I'm sure you can how works in progress.

We've tried some things. We've had success with some. We've created bigger messes with others, such as life. And, but we think that we've gotten to a point where we have an idea. We'll continue to use templates for the visual style and branding of programs that want a consistent look and feel.

We'll use blueprints for planned and scheduled updates that we have control over, and we know will happen on a regularly scheduled basis. And then we'll use comments for those more flexible things that we need to put the point of need for students that we don't want cluttering our course sites, cognitive load, a huge issue. Anything to add? I'm gonna save the, the one more ground worthy pun to the end. Oh, great. So here are our recommendations.

So first of all, there are a lot of nuances, but these three tools, between how you decide to use them in your own process in a way that works for you. Someone needs to be able to explain those to your stakeholders. So you can't just have like someone who sits in the back and, you know, like, makes weird diagrams like the one I showed you. You have to have someone who has a relationship with the stakeholders get familiar with the nuances of how these tools work. And as we all know, instructors are the first point of contact for students.

If a student is like, what is this weird policy in our course? They're not calling me. Even though I know why it's in there. But so it's really crucial that we're not just like popping things in people's courses without their knowledge. And we need to have a communication strategy one that works better than our please copy from the sandbox and not your previous course site communication strategy. So that instructors know what's in their core versus why and how it impacts their specific students.

If you are not your school's main canvas admin, I recommend becoming friends with them. I was hoping that, our main canvas admin, who has helped me so much with this stuff would be in here. So I could give him a shout out, but he probably has already heard me say everything I said in this presentation, so no need to come. But, you will, is if this is something where you're gonna try to develop a strategy where you use these different tools in, in concert, you will have many, many questions many different scenarios to test and having someone who really knows the ins and outs of canvas, to bounce ideas off of and to talk about different scenarios, it has been really crucial to us, as as we've pursued this, this desire for consistency. And then finally, you know, as I mentioned earlier, some of our programs don't care.

And they don't, in fact, they don't even want their courses to be to use templates. And so we really need to find everyone I think has a different balance between templatized and flexible. For us, you know, it's different program to program. It's different in those three graduate undergraduate professional development pockets. But it probably looks completely different everywhere.

And so I think finding the balance that work for you, your institution, your faculty, and your students is really crucial, not instead of trying to find, like, a one size fits all solution. They're ready for your dad joke. Oh, I again, if I if I've stolen this one too without realizing it, so I've talked about oh shoot moments earlier, but maybe in the future, we'll have more, moments. Oh, okay. I don't know who would say that hit ridden my made background.

So it's Anyways, yeah, we're happy to take questions. Go ahead. How's this? Blueprints and templates, or, like, if you have a template, the subaccount that comes in, and then for some reason you need to push blueprint content, how does the does it override does it just look below, like, how how could those be? Yeah. A blueprint. So a template basically functions once it's populated into the course it functions as anything else you built in the course site would.

So whatever a blueprint and you know more about blueprint, so you can probably answer that. Yeah. No. You're you're answering it correctly, but Okay. Great.

You wouldn't want to have a template, have identical content to what you would receive from a blueprint because even though it is identical, they don't see that that way unless they were associated with each other in the first place. So make the template If you know that you're gonna have content that you want to push my blueprint in there, make that association, and then you can you can update that template, but don't don't have existing content in there that matches what the blueprint is, then you get the dash two dash three -- Yeah. -- redundant things. But the good thing is that templates don't lock. So if you were to have duplicate content in a blueprint and a template, you could and you were to push locked content from a blueprint, you could delete the content from a template, or anyone could delete the content from the template.

It should specify. It's a course site that you created from the template. Don't think you want to be sending blueprint to an actual course template. It's a course I bet you made from this. Okay.

I mean, it might work. I I tested that one yet, but I Yeah. Do you have to spend that a little more? What of the I've covered for our, you know, call calpers. Mhmm. And we're gonna, replace, you know, some of the electric content.

Could you mind just So if you made the change in a blueprint and push it to a template. It would only impact course sites that you created in the future, which sounds like it's what you want to do. I actually have never, so a a template course has to be designated as a template by a root admin at your and so I've actually never tested, like, we only have two of them. And, they're I've actually never tested, pushing blueprint content to multiple templates. That's the first thing to do tonight.

Yeah. But that's a great question and we should try it out. Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry.

Air and start entertaining you, and you wanna feel that, the copies of it increases. And one thing that I thought is using embedded Google Docs, or it doesn't like any of the static keys. And so that way, you use keep on pushing the same content out and you're just updating the pages with the current call centers, the links, locations, at all, Yeah. We tried that, like, several years ago. I think there was an accessibility issue.

With how you embed the Google doc, but I can't really remember. You're worth revisiting though because if that has changed in eight years, then that could be a, definitely, to be a solution. Yeah. Sorry. You had a question in the front.

Well, wasn't that a question at the time? If you a template is create, is used to create new courses, not existing. So if you take a blue frankly, and you push it out to someone who has a template that overrides what was in that template. So for those who were the reason why one might not do that at least in our universities, we have some content that's standard in every single we wanna be able to make changes that in one place and push it out every single force, not retroactively, like, forces perhaps running correctly in a future force. Yeah. And so what I'm trying to figure out is what is the white label? Yeah.

I mean, I think you absolutely if you had a blueprint that was associated with multiple templates. Could use that. You could also create a page in comments for each of those, you know, for that standard information that's in every course. And then push it, but I think people then have to accept the change, which is not, yeah, you just want it to happen. Yeah.

I would look further into the blueprint functionality and see how that might work for you. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I would talk to your your person about blueprints.

Accessibility specialist. You should work with them. We've got docs of solution with segmentation. The because that might be the best way to Yeah. What would we do I got someone down here too.

How many persons do you have currently every every quarter, how many courses do you have adopting a template? And how long does it take for those templates to apply? We run about two hundred ish courses between two hundred and two fifty courses each quarter. In terms of live sections with students, we, our office develops between twenty and twenty five new courses each quarter, but between new courses and revisions. In terms of how many of those courses use a template, we're really focusing on our undergraduate programs right now, and those all use templates, I would say maybe a third of our new courses are developed with a template. And I mean, the the I don't know, you know, we created the template. It went through an iterative process with a lot of feedback from our stakeholders, but the template is applied automatically when we build the sandbox, and then we populate it with content.

So it actually just makes the course, building process a little bit quicker. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.

So with, secrets, and the guy had different cohorts of students that need different information. So would I create, a blueprint course for each cohort, or could I have one blueprint course kind of as the the where I attach all the information, and then I'm pushing out oh, this is the first year information to the first year course of second year mission to second year courses. Or is it better to have it split up between multiple groups or courses? That's Yeah. I would I would say multiple groups. I would say multiple as well.

I don't know if there's ways that you can do things with course sections that might be a way. Are you talking about are you are students in, like, actual different canvas course sites or same course Okay. Then, yeah. I would, I think, multiple blueprints only because you could do it all in one, and you could have them all be unpublished, and then you could just choose to publish the stuff. That you send it, that you send over.

But the unpublished stuff will still be there. And if if you have other people teaching too, and it if that could cause confusion, then you might not not want that. One thing about blueprints also is that if you are organized into subaccounts, this the blueprint has to be at the level of the subaccount that the courses are in, if they're all the same subaccount, then then you're fine. But if they're in separate subaccounts, you would need to have the blueprints be either at a higher level, and then they can go down to the lower levels. Or just be in the separate kind of parallel subaccounts.

We're having an issue. We don't we don't use them and leave them associated. We use them just to push out a bunch of stuff and then disassociate them. Yeah. But we have the department tried to leave associates, and they would go in and start preparing things for the next term.

But then someone would seek it with the urine. Uh-huh. Yep. So that's something we have to worry about. That's a great point.

Have the ability to change, but with Sprint, they need to know, don't seek it. It's not for this term. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really great point.

Thank you. In the back again. Those four new fields update content and provide updated information as needed. So we created a lucrative offer and all those four and solve the mating dimension, but it gets a little bit funky to have Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Go ahead. When you were describing the problem, you were trying to solve at the start of your presentation. Are you sure you're not working Alright. Work.

Is there any way with templates or will work the way that, will print out here the way you wanna works in Canvas to prohibit instructors from making changes So blueprint content can be locked. But the lock only lasts in the the course that was associated with the blueprint. So if they copy it from the course that was associated with the blueprint, into a new course, that they're teaching from, then that one is unlocked. And then they can keep making changes. And yeah.

Okay. When we've talked about similar issues, not exactly the same, but similar issues. The suggested solution has been to create custom course role for an instructor who's not allowed to copy. So it would be a custom role, but the root admin, the main admin at your institution would have the ability to remove course copy privileges from that person. And then you someone, you know, a staff person be the only person to push out content.

We've never tried that, but that wasn't an idea suggested to me. Yeah. I heard in the API talk earlier someone found a way to even modify the user roles with the API so that only certain types of instances would be Only two only certain types of courses would be preventable from from copying so they could still do copies and and, like, they've got a a prep site Yeah. Oh, that it's associated with another permission. Yeah.

I feel like you would have to have, like, pretty extensive conversation. About the back end stuff to do that. Yeah. Go ahead. Communication strategy and, like, making connections.

I was curious. What is your method of communicating changes, especially with the price, which seem like they're more behind the gate of, like, Yeah. So we do quarterly email. We also do we don't run it, but quarterly faculty meeting that's run by the director of the academic program. And so they communicate those changes person at the quarterly faculty meeting, and then we follow-up with email.

Depends. Yeah. We yeah. In an in an ideal world, it is preemptive communication. Right? But yeah, it can definitely depend.

Some of our larger programs, like our data science program, they have a quarterly faculty, like, synchronous meeting before the for the quarter begins too. That's usually pretty well attended, and they kinda reiterates some of the stuff that was sent out asynchronously that way too. Yeah. We We intermingle them. We build the frame.

Well, not necessarily, actually. What we do is, kind of what someone had suggested So we use Blueprints, to push out like a resource module that goes in addition to our template. And so that content that's standard across programs that is in our resource module. And then the template is the structure, like you said, the framework of a course.