Creating Courses from a Template

Owned by Luc Richard
Last updated: Feb 26, 2024 by Frederick Harju
4 min read

When creating a course, instructors may want to start from a template. This saves them time and ensures consistency if courses have common activities or resources. For example, if all of your instructor-led courses have a face-to-face activity, it's best when creating these courses to use a template course that already has a face-to-face activity in it. This saves you from having to add a Face-to-face activity after the fact and configure it. The same comment goes for a courses that leverage a Certificate of Completion. Rather than installing a certificate of completion from an .MBZ file after the fact, you can leverage a course template that already has a certificate configured.

It's important to understand that any course can be used as a template. In other words, when defining a template in the learning environment, you are adding it exactly as you would any other course. This is why some organizations add a special course category called "Templates" or even prefix the name of their courses with the word "Template" (e.g. Template - Instructor-led Courses) to identify their templates.

There are two methods for creating courses from a template:

  • By duplicating a course, which is better when adding a single course at a time

  • By specifying the template in a separate column in a CSV file, which is better when uploading your courses in bulk.

Step-by-step Guide

To duplicate a course (when adding a single course)

  1. Go to Site Administration > Courses > Manage Courses and Categories

  2. Find the course in question

  3. Click on the "Duplicate" icon next to the course

  4. Fill out the form to give the course a unique name

  5. Click on the "Copy & View" button at the bottom of the form

The course and all of its settings and activities will be copied into a new course under the new name. 





When uploading courses, the system will see if a column labelled "templatecourse" is present in your CSV. If it is, it will duplicate the "templatecourse" rather than create a new / empty course. The field "templatecourse" needs to match the shortname of an existing course in the system. Below is an example of a CSV file that would use an existing course as a template:

shortname,fullname,category_path,summary,templatecoures
WHMIS,Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System,Classroom,This is my summary,template_classroom_courses

Based on the example above:

  • "WHMIS" would be the shortname for the new course

  • "Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System" is the full name of the course

  • "Classroom" is the category the new course will be stored under

  • "This is my summary" is the summary for the new course

  • The "template_classroom_courses" will be used as as template. This means that if this course had a face-to-face activity and a certificate of completion activity (two activities that are common in instructor-led courses), then both of these activities would appear in the new "WHMIS" course. The activities would retain the same configuration in the WHMIS course as they had in the template course.

Once your CSV is ready:

  1. Go to Site Administration > Courses > Upload courses

  2. Either drag and drop the CSV file or click the 'Choose a file' button and select the file in the file picker

  3. Select appropriate import options carefully

    1. Generally speaking, , then click the preview button.

Important Notes

  • When uploading courses, it is recommended that you use the "Preview" option to see if any errors were detected in the previewed rows. If you proceed with the upload and there were something wrong detected with a course, it will be ignored.

  • The procedure above will work when creating and updating existing courses. When updating courses, it's critical that you verify the outcome on your staging server first. This feature will do its best to resolve conflicts between the course you are trying to update and the template course, but Dual Code makes no guarantee that the end result will be as per your expectation. The feature is available on an AS IS basis when updating courses.

  • The following are general observations with courses that were updated using the procedure above. Please note that your results may vary as the course you are trying to update and the template course may vary from the ones used during our tests.

    • The "topic" summary will be overwritten if and only if the course you are updating didn't already have a custom topic summary. If it already had one, the summary will not be updated

    • The activities of the template course will be added at the end of the topic. In other words, if the template course has 2 activities at the end of topic 3, then the course that you update will have the same 2 activities at the end of topic 3. The "old" activities in topic 3 will remain.

    • If you update the course multiple times with the "templatecourse" field, the activities in the "templatecourse" will appear multiple times in the course you are updating.



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