Bulk Course Copy
Hello
I am trying to do a bulk course copy, but when I am populating the courses, i cannot find a way to get the Course offering ID number.
Is there a place to get all the course offering IDs under a parent course?
Answers
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Hi
The Org Unit ("OU") numbers are seen in the browser address bar whenever you're in a Course Offering, usually the earliest one to appear in the path if you see multiple ones. You can also see the OU#s in the Org Unit Editor. If you don't have too many to look up, you can go to Admin Tools > Org Unit Editor, search for your chosen parent Org Unit and then check the Children in the table on that OU's page. This will only show directly related child OUs though.
If you have a large number of OUs to look up, or if you need to find the children two or more levels down from a given parent OU (like a Department for example) then I would recommend going to the Data Hub and downloading the Organizational Units and Organizational Unit Descendants (or Organizational Unit Parents) Brightspace Data Sets (BDS). By combining these in a BI tool (try using XLOOKUP in Microsoft Excel) you can create a filtered report/list of all relationships for that parent.
A trick you could use, is to do the following:
- Create a dummy Super Administrator (which you'll delete later). This will result in a bunch of enrollment records across all OUs in the site.
- Go to Data Hub and click on the Enrollments and Withdrawals Advanced Data Set (ADS).
- Set the OU# of the parent you want to use (you'll need to wait for the new data to be populated in the Insights Data tables before these enrollment events are visible to Data Hub)
- Download that ADS when it's ready and you should have a list of all OUs found under the parent. You may need to filter the list for just the Course Offerings though, if your chosen parent is a Department. If so then you'll again need to incorporate the Organizational Structure BDS to look up the OrgUnitTypes for each of the entries in the report - then filter for Course Offerings (or OUType Id #3)
- Delete the new Super Admin at your leisure.
I hope that's helpful!
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Hello @San.K.599,
First, I want to address that there are two properties of a Org Unit that are typically used to uniquely identify a course: Org Unit ID and Course Offering Code.
In theory, of those two, the only value that is guaranteed to be unique is the Org Unit ID — that is because this is the database-generated identifier for the org unit. However, Course Offering Codes often times are unique in practice, especially when courses are synced with an SIS. This is because Course Offering Codes — in an another system — may be the unique identifier. Still, in theory, it is possible (not advised) to have multiple org units in your Brightspace environment with the same Course Offering Code.
Having said this, since Course Offering Codes — for some processes such as this — may be parsed as an identifying value, it is always an effective practice to treat these codes as unique. In other words: its not a great idea to create more than one org unit with the same org unit code.
With that out of the way, and with respect to Copy Course Bulk (CCB), the process may accept either Org Unit ID or Course Offering Code as an identifier for the source course (course from which components are being copied). And it accepts Course Offering Code as the identifier for the destination course (course into which components are being copied into).
That's a long leadup to answering your question, but hopefully you appreciate those additional details.
Now, to answer your question: to gather up all of the Org Unit IDs and/or Course Offering Codes that descend from a parent org unit, you can compile these data points by using the Data Hub. Within the Data Hub, you will want to pull and join a few Organizational Unit Data Sets including Organizational Units, and possibly either Organizational Org Unit Parents or Organizational Org Unit Descendants. Once you have these data sets joined on Org Unit ID, you can filter on Org Unit Type (3) to see only the Course Offering data. From there, it would just be a matter of copy/pasting the targeted Org Unit IDs and/or Course Offering Codes as needed.
Alternatively, if you're dealing with a smaller subset of courses, you could manually look these up using the Org Unit Editor, which will display both the Org Unit ID and Course Offering Code of the targeted org unit.
I hope that helps!
Jeffrey
