Creating a Master Course

Introduction

Creating master courses can be useful for copying content from one course to another, or for creating a fresh copy of a course.  For example, a school might have a course which runs for a year, and when it is over, the course needs a ‘reset’, as new students will be starting the course. Another instance where master courses might be useful is if there will be multiple different classes using the same content and graded activities, but each teacher has the liberty to arrange the content and formatting to their own likes; here you could install the master course into separate course shells for each teacher. The beauty of using master courses is that you will always retain an unchanged backup that can be repeatedly used.

The objective of this article is to provide you with the necessary information and steps to successfully create a master course and restore it into a course shell.

Sections/Summary of the Steps

Before getting into the details of using master courses, please note the following sections/steps.

• Section 1: Creating a master course
• Section 2: Restoring the master into a new course

This article will also expand on the following:

• Best Practices

Section 1: Creating a master course

To create the master course, you will perform a backup of the course. In the screenshot below, we are creating a backup of the course with the short name ‘MAST’.

For steps to create a course backup, please see the article: Course backup, reset and restore.

Note: it is important to uncheck the box beside ‘Include enrolled users’ so that if users are enrolled in the master course, they and their data will not be included when the course is restored.

Section 2: Restoring a course

To restore a course from a backup, follow the instructions in the article: Course backup, reset and restore. When choosing the backup file, make sure to use the master course backup from Section 1.

When restoring a course, you have a few different options that you can choose to use.

Restoring into a course shell

A course shell is basically an empty course that will have content imported into it.  Using this option is the most efficient if you are creating a large number of courses.

If you are creating a multitude of courses,, upload the course shells via CSV file. Navigate to Administration block > Site administration > Courses > Upload courses

You can then restore the master course backup into each of the shells.

Restore into a new course

When using the restore feature, you also have the option to restore the backup into a brand new course. This would be ideal if you are creating only a small number of restorations.

Merge with an existing course

Choosing this option, the content you choose from the backup will be merged with existing content already in the course. If you had created some content in a new course, and wanted to add the master course’s to it, this would be a great choice.

Best Practices

• When using course shells, it is best to make the shells have the same number of Weekly/Topic sections as the master course
• It is a good idea to save the backup to your computer or an external device.  This way, you have a backup of the backup!