We have set up "master" templates for each of our courses. These templates contain both structure and content of each course.
I want automate the creating of the courses at the commencement of each semester, based on our timetable information.
I have got Valance to the point of creating a course from a template. From what I can see in the documentation it looks like I will have to parse the content of the template and copy individual items across to the unique courses.
Is this correct, or is there a simple way to copy the entire content from the template across to the actual course instance?
The answer seems to be that there is no simple way of bulk copying all the content from a template to a course offering using the Valence API.
I had a go at doing it by traversing the content structure by accessing the TOC object from the template then copying each individual module and topic in the structure.
Unfortunately this is made all the more difficult by the fact that the API doesn't return the id of the module or topic created. So, when it comes to adding the nested content objects, you have to requery the current course modules to find the object you just added.
At that point it has become all too hard and we're going to automate the creation of course offerings from the template, but advise teachers to use the built in Import/Export/Copy Components feature to copy the content from the template into the course offering.