One of the peculiarities of teaching is that two sections of the same course are almost never exactly the same.
This is especially apparent to me now that I teach both synchronous and asynchronous versions of AP French. The courses cover much of the same material, but they cannot always use the same lessons in the same way. An activity that works well during a live Zoom meeting may need different directions, additional scaffolding, or an entirely different follow-up task when students complete it independently.
The reasonable solution is to maintain separate courses. The unreasonable part was having to rebuild all the shared material one assignment at a time.
Innovation Assessments now includes a Copy Module to Course feature designed to solve this problem.
More Than Copying a List of Links
A module in Innovation Assessments may contain a complicated collection of learning materials. It might include a reading activity, a test, a writing assignment, a PowerPoint, a PDF, a spoken response, a conversation, and a vocabulary exercise. Some of these tasks have their own question records, rubrics, uploaded media, or supporting data.
Copying only the visible module would not be enough. The titles might appear in the new course, but the assignments could still point back to the originals—or worse, open without the files and questions they require.
Copy Module therefore makes what I would call a “deep copy.” It duplicates the module, its assignments, and the supporting content necessary for those assignments to function independently.
The system currently supports the major Innovation Assessments task types, including:
- Tests and Études.
- Writing assignments.
- Convo and Presto speaking activities.
- WordStudy, Grammar, Cloze, sorting, ordering, and other study tasks.
- PDFs, media, and PowerPoint presentations.
- Forums, chats, and Viva Voce activities.
- SlideCraft and Ventura activities.
- Combo assessments.
- Video Lessons.
The list is fairly comprehensive because the practical value of copying a module declines rapidly if the teacher must stop afterward and rebuild half of it.
An Independent Copy
The word independent is important here.
There are two possible ways to copy course material. One is to place a new link in the destination course that points to the original assignment. This saves storage and seems efficient. It also creates a trap.
Suppose a teacher copies a test into another course and then changes two questions to better suit the new class. If both courses are using the same underlying test, the questions change in the original course too. This is exactly the kind of mistake that may not be discovered until students are taking the assessment.
I know this because I made similar mistakes in an earlier version of my own software!
Copy Module takes the safer approach. Question records, private rubrics, supporting lists, task configuration, and locally stored files are duplicated when necessary. The copied assignments receive their own records and can be edited without changing the source module.
Stock rubrics may remain shared because they are intended to be common resources. Teacher-created private rubrics are duplicated so that the copied version can evolve independently.
What Happens to Uploaded Files?
Uploaded files require special attention. A copied Étude might depend on a PDF. A Media activity could contain an image or audio recording. A PowerPoint lesson obviously requires its presentation file. A Video Lesson requires the recorded video.
The copy process identifies locally stored files used by the module and creates protected copies for the destination. References in the new assignments are then changed to point to those copied files.
For PowerPoint activities, disposable slide-image caches are not needlessly duplicated. The source presentation is copied and the destination can generate its own slide information. This keeps the copy independent without reproducing temporary files that the system can recreate.
The result should look ordinary to the teacher: open the new module, test its assignments, and make whatever changes the destination course requires.
Student Records Are Never Copied
The purpose of this feature is to copy instructional content, not student history.
Student responses, scores, admissions, proctor logs, and other student records remain with the original course. The destination receives clean assignments ready for a different group of students.
This distinction is especially important when copying a module that has already been used. A teacher may want next year’s version of the lessons, but certainly does not want last year’s submissions attached to them.
All copied assignments also begin hidden. This gives the teacher an opportunity to inspect the module, adjust directions, remove unnecessary items, and test links before making anything available to students.
How It Works
The teacher opens the module menu in the source course and selects Copy to Course.
The copy page displays a manifest showing the assignments that will be included. Internal supporting items also appear when they are required by a more complicated activity.
The teacher then:
- Selects a destination course.
- Enters a title for the copied module.
- Selects Create Independent Copy.
The source course is excluded from the destination list. This prevents a teacher from accidentally duplicating a module into the same course.
If a module with the same name already exists in the destination, the two modules remain separate. The system does not merge them and does not overwrite the existing one. Teachers may choose a different title during copying or rename the module afterward.
When the process is complete, the teacher arrives in the destination course and receives confirmation showing how many independent elements were created.
Synchronous and Asynchronous Courses
My immediate reason for wanting this feature was the need to produce an asynchronous version of a synchronous course.
The two versions may begin with much of the same curriculum. Both need the same vocabulary, cultural readings, listening exercises, and assessments. But the synchronous version can depend on live discussion and teacher explanation. The asynchronous version needs more written guidance, recorded instruction, and perhaps additional checks for understanding.
Copy Module lets me begin with the curriculum I have already built and then modify the copied version. I am not forced to choose between maintaining one unsuitable course for both groups and rebuilding an entire second course from scratch.
The same method could be useful for:
- Honors and standard versions of a course.
- Modified and standard curricula.
- Different class periods that have begun to diverge.
- Summer-school versions of full-year courses.
- Reusing a unit in the next academic year.
- Adapting a course for another school or schedule.
- Creating a demonstration course without disturbing the original.
Copying Is Not the Same as Synchronizing
Once copied, the modules are independent. A later change to the source is not automatically sent to the destination, and a change in the destination does not return to the source.
This is intentional.
Automatic synchronization would reintroduce the same danger the independent-copy method was designed to avoid. A teacher should be able to shorten an asynchronous test, change the directions on a modified assignment, or replace a document without wondering which other courses will be changed.
The tradeoff is that improvements made later in one course may need to be repeated manually elsewhere. For my purposes, this is preferable to invisible connections among assignments that appear to be separate.
Less Rebuilding, More Adapting
Teachers invest a tremendous amount of time developing good course materials. Reusing that work should not mean either starting over or creating fragile links among several courses.
Copy Module is meant to occupy the sensible middle ground. It saves the organization and content of an existing module, carries along the files and supporting records it needs, excludes all student history, and then gives the teacher a clean version to adapt.
The computer performs the repetitive work. The teacher remains responsible for the important part: deciding how the lesson should change for the students who will receive it.
Authorship note: This feature announcement was generated by artificial intelligence using samples of David Jones’s blog writing as a stylistic guide. It was reviewed for consistency with the current Innovation Assessments Copy Module feature.
