Canvas Course Copy: Option to only copy quizzes? Deep Copies instead of full copies?

Michael Espey

The more I think about the beta course copy features, the more it worries me. We have a solid number of courses with hours and hours of content, and if we roll out the course copy changes as proposed that will mean that all of this evergreen content will be duplicated every semester (up to 3 times per year) to each section. That is a TON of wasted space. There are even quite a few cases where this ends up with a worse user experience as metrics cannot be easily compared year over year. We have a 4-year retention policy in place for unused content, so eventually, the duplicate sessions will be cleaned up, but that will mean that we have at a minimum 12 copies of nearly 50 hours worth of content available for each section (and up to ~10 sections that all would get their own copy) of one course. Some quick back of the napkin math tells me that is too much.

Hopefully, this is something that is on Panopto's radar, and that there will be a solution when in Production. I would love to see a situation where there is a course folder out somewhere on the site that moves (instead of copies) from year to year. This could be a separate location for this content, then the things that need to be copied (namely quizzes) can be copied into the course folder as it exists now.

Just from a storage perspective, with all of the conversation out there about data retention and overall footprint, this seems like a huge step back.

A set of user defaults that we as admins can make available would be much better:

• Do nothing on course copy
• Move the content to the new course folder but copy sessions with quizzes (default)
• Copy content to new course folder and update links
• (maybe something new)Make a deep copy