Copying a course

Two different things with the same name, and the difference matters.

• Duplicate makes another copy on this site. For running the same course again next term.
• Copy to another site sends it to a different organisation’s site. For sharing or reselling a course.

Both are reached from the course’s own page.

Duplicating here

You get a complete second course: modules, lessons, content, questions and their answers. It arrives inactive, so you can rename and adjust it before anybody sees it.

What does not come across is everything to do with people — nobody is enrolled, no progress, no marks. A duplicate is the course, not the class.

Copying to another site

You choose the destination site and optionally a new title. The course is rebuilt there: modules, lessons, content, questions, and the images and documents the lessons use.

It arrives inactive there too, and the receiving site owns its copy outright — they can edit it, price it and run it however they like.

What travels, and what deliberately does not

Settings mostly travel: the enrolment policy, the price, the dates, the enrolment limit, whether the gradebook is on.

Two things are deliberate exceptions, both about release schedules:

• A relative drip travels. “Module 2 opens 7 days in” means the same thing on any site, so it arrives intact.
• Fixed dates do not. A cohort’s calendar belongs to that cohort. A copy arrives in fixed-date mode with no dates — which, because an undated module is simply open, means the whole course is available while the receiving site sets its own calendar. A course quietly opening on last term’s dates on somebody else’s site is a failure nobody would think to check for.

A copy is a fork

Once copied, the two courses are independent. Fixing a typo in the original does not fix it in the copy, and there is no link back — so a course copied to six sites is six places to make the same correction.

That is worth knowing before you copy something to a dozen customers. If the course is still changing, it may be worth waiting.

Where it came from

A copied course does record its origin, which is how billing knows which organisation a resold course belongs to. See Which site is billed for a course.

Copying several at once

If you are setting up a new customer site with a dozen courses, do it from a spreadsheet rather than one at a time — see Importing course copies from a spreadsheet.