Transferring Course Content Between Instructors and Courses

Transferring Course Content Between Instructors and Courses

As an instructor using Carmen, at some point you may have found yourself wishing for an easier solution for recycling or reusing course materials that you have invested a lot of time and effort creating. Carmen includes integrated features that allow you to share and copy your content in a simple and efficient manner. Whether you want to make an individual page or an entire course available outside of a single course iteration, you can use the content that you have created in Carmen across multiple courses.

The sections below outline four different methods that can be used to transfer Carmen content. Each section contains a brief description that explains how the feature works, followed by step-by-step instructions. If you have any questions or concerns about how any of these processes work, schedule a consultation with one of our ODE instructional designers who can help you navigate and troubleshoot these features.

“Send To…”

To share course content including entire modules as well as individual course components like Pages, Discussions, Quizzes, or Assignments you can use the “Send To…” Carmen feature. This feature is best used to send content to another individual with similar access permissions. This feature is particularly a good option if you are looking to share a limited number of items.

“Copy To…”

The “Copy To…” option is the feature that functions most easily for pushing content from one course to another where you have Teacher or Designer permissions in both locations. It functions almost identically to the “Send To…” feature, but without the additional step of having to locate the content in your account and then push it out to the correct destination.

Bulk Importing Select Content

There is also a means to select content in bulk to move from one course to another. For example, you may want to move core content created via Pages from an active or past course but create Assignments that are specific to a new course that you are building. Or maybe you would like to create Quizzes using Question Banks that you have carefully built in one course and transfer them to another. Carmen provides a feature that allows you to move entire groups of content all at once without copying the entire course.

Whole Course Export / Import

If you, like many instructors at OSU, use a Master course shell to build your course content so that you can experiment with and tweak design settings and arrangements, you may benefit most from the export package feature in Carmen. Assuming that your design is complete or mostly complete – or in the event that you are teaching the same course with minimal change from one academic year to the next – you can export your course via a .zip file and import the contents contained in that file into your new course shell.