Copying Forward with Assignment Builder
NOTE - InTech highly recommends working out of a master/playspace/development course when using Assignment Builder
When you copy-forward a course with Assignment Builder activities in it, there are a couple of things that are going to behave unexpectedly, and also very differently, from a lot of the other applications that integrate with D2L. Here is a quick rundown of things you need to know:
Assignments copy from the original course they were built in
When you copy forward Assignments in D2L, Assignment Builder will reach all the way back to the course that you created your Assignments in to access and copy the data to the target course. For instance, let's say you adopt Assignment Builder in Spring 2023 and build out all of your Assignments in your SP23 course. You continue using Assignment Builder for several semesters, copying your SP23 course to FA23, then your FA23 course to SP24, and so on. Each time you make that copy, Assignment Builder is actually copying all of your assignments from the SP23 course in which you built the Assignments. This is important to know because if you need to make updates or changes to your Assignment Builder Assignments, or the VoiceThreads within them, you would need to go back to your SP23 course and make those changes. You could not make the changes in the SP24 course and expect the changes to appear in the FA24 if you copied SP24 to FA24.
Summary: VoiceThread Assignment Builder copies forward assignments from the original course the Assignment was created in. Any changes to an Assignment need to be made in the original course where it was created.
The logic that performs copies of Assignments into a new semester's course only happens once
When you copy a course containing Assignment Builder Assignments from one course to another, the cloning logic that happens in order to copy all the data from the Assignment into the new semester will only occur one time on the first copy. This is important to know because: Let's assume you build all of your assignments in a SP23 course, and you eventually want to copy those to a FA23 course. You reach the end of the SP23 semester, and you copy your course containing the Assignment Builder Assignments into the FA23 course. Then you remember that you needed to make some changes and updates to the Assignment settings, add some slides, and add a few new comments. You go back into the SP23 semester and perform all those updates, and then recopy the course. Unfortunately, you will not see those new updates come to the FA23 course. This is because the in logic that gets performed when the course copies forward and all the Assignment data gets performed only once on the first copy occurrence. The subsequent copies will repeatedly take that first copy that was made and place it into the new course.
The only way to resolve this issue is to perform the updates in both the course in which the Assignments were created, and the course that you're copying to, or you must request a new D2L course in which you can perform an initial copy with the updates already made in the original course.
Summary: VoiceThread Assignment Builder copies the data from one course to another only once. Any changes made after course copy must be made in BOTH the original course and the new course.
If you have any questions or difficulties with Assignment Builder, please contact us for help!
D2L and InTech Consulting Team Contact Information
Email - d2l@arizona.edu
Phone - 520.626.6804
Web - intech.arizona.edu
Calendly - https://help.d2l.arizona.edu/Schedule-Zoom-Consult2