Copying and Cleaning Content into your New Course

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Now that Winter 2018 and Spring 2018 course requests are available, you are likely looking to populate your new courses with materials you have already created and compiled. The Copy Components feature in D2L allows instructors to replicate the course components from one course offering to another. These include all commonly used components such as — news, content, files, gradebook structure, quizzes/question library, discussion group structure, and more. You can use this tool to easily re-use relevant content from one D2L course offering to another.

For written instructions to help copy, please visit the D2L Copy Components documentation we have available. Alternately, you can also watch a video walkthrough of the process.

After copying materials into your new course, you may be interested in cleaning up some unnecessary things.  Some areas have a habit of bulking up over time, and we recommend checking them for unused items.

  1. Content, Dropbox, Grades, and Discussions areas are things you probably clean up every semester.
  2. The Groups tool will transfer over course sections from previous semesters.  Clean out Groups from previous years to make your relevant Groups easier to find.
  3. News items often include specific dates, time sensitive information, or mention of Content items that may or may not be around anymore.  Keep the ones that are still relevant, but delete the expired ones that you don’t intend on reworking each semester.
  4. In the Quizzes area, the Question Library is a great resource to house questions you think you might use again in the future. It is also a chronic hiding place of questions instructors deemed unsuitable for use in their classes.
  5. It is not uncommon for Instructors to build Surveys for a specific purpose, and only use them one semester.
  6. The Manage Files area houses everything you have ever uploaded to content.  If there are old documents, PDFs, PowerPoints that you don’t need you can remove them by going through the Manage Files area.

If you have any questions regarding the copy components tool or would like assistance cleaning up your course, please contact UW-W D2L Support.