Manage Courses (Rollover) - the process

Before the end of the academic year, you need to consider how your existing Canvas courses should be 'rolled over' to create new ones for the new academic year. University policy states that current courses should become an archive to enable students to subsequently refer back to them. Archived courses will appear to enrolled students under their Courses > Past Enrolments.

The rollover process is restricted to Canvas users with the Local Canvas Coordinator (LCC) or Unit Administrator roles. Note that you may need to work with course administrators to 'tidy up' some aspects of the new (rolled over) courses; for example some functions (especially within Settings) are available only to course administrators who are enrolled on a particular course.

The diagram below shows some of the things to consider in your existing course, and the need to update them in the newly rolled-over course:

 

Note: The rollover process is not intended to simply create a new course in Canvas, for the following reasons:

  • A course can be rolled over once only. This shows up in the Rollover Status, and the parent course will be unavailable for future rollovers. So the rollover function needs to be used for that purpose only.
  • An association remains (behind the scenes) between the parent course and the rolled-over course, to provide an audit trail of which courses have been rolled over to which new ones.

If you need to duplicate a course, then please complete the Request for a new Canvas course form Links to an external site., and use Import Content (how-to video Links to an external site.) to import existing content from another Canvas course.

 

The following section describes the considerations and preparations we recommend before you embark on rolling over your Canvas courses for the new academic year. During the duplication process, you will be offered various choices, and it helps to have considered the options in advance.

Type of course: Think about the type of course you want to roll over:

  • Programme course: if the programme course contains embedded links to teaching courses, those links will need to be updated in the new programme course, after the rollover process has completed for all related teaching courses.
  • Subject course: if this has a term of ‘Ongoing’, it cannot be rolled over. If a subject course provides an index to programme courses, then those links will need updating after the rollover process has completed for all linked courses.
  • Teaching course: Consider how your content is structured (e.g. in Modules, Files or Pages). This will impact on the ‘tidy-up’ job after rollover, especially if you need to publish material to students in stages during the term or academic year.
  • Tutorial course: Should this be rolled over, and if so, who should do it? If you do not have a Local Canvas Coordinator in your college, please contact canvas@it.ox.ac.uk for assistance.

Importing content: Do you want to import content from the previous year's course? There are two options:

  1. Create an empty version of a course containing only settings (title, academic year and other course settings) (without copying over any structure or content). If you wish to then import a Canvas course template, please consult our Canvas templates page. Alternatively, if you have an existing customised template, you can go to the new (empty) course, and use Settings > Import Course Content to select and import content from another Canvas course.
  2. Create a duplicate of a course, including course settings (title, academic year and other course settings) and all content (select the Include content checkbox in the options pop-up window). This will duplicate the structure and content (pages, files and structure of activities – without student contributions) of the previous course as it is at the point of rollover. See our FAQ about what content will be duplicated.

Enrolments: Consider the People enrolled in your current course:

  • You can choose whether or not to have manual staff enrolments copied across to the new course.
  • You can choose whether or not to include existing Oxford Groups (student cohorts or ad-hoc groups) in the copy process. The Oxford Groups tool (GET) page provides more information about groups that can be enrolled systematically (in any course).

Dates: Consider the Start and End dates in your current course:

  • Does the End Date for the existing course need extending, or will the Start Date of the rolled-over course need to be brought forward in the light of coronavirus considerations?

 

Warning: If your current course has completed (i.e. come to the end of the term or academic year), do not click End this Course or Reset Course Content in the course Settings. This would clear all the content in the parent course. The parent course needs to remain as the 'archive' - and will appear for students in their list of Past Enrolments.

* The rollover process itself does not affect the parent course; however, the parent and rolled-over courses remain connected to each other.

 

Notes:
  • One of the options when rolling over a course is to include automatic enrolments based on the Oxford Groups tool (GET). It's a good idea to ensure that you make optimal use of the GET during the coming academic year, in preparation for next year's GET rollover process.
  • After you have rolled over existing courses, some work will be required to check the new ones and update content, dates, contact details, enrolments etc.
  • Refer to our page on steps to complete after rollover to guide you through how to update the new course/s.