How do Canvas blueprints work with Atomic Assessments?

Understand how using Canvas blueprints can affect Atomic Assessments in blueprint and associated courses.

Atomic Assessments does work with Canvas blueprints. When you are building your blueprint master course, you will need to decide if you want the Atomic Assessments content in the associated courses to be a read-only copy of the master course content, or if you want the content to be unique copies in each of the associated courses.

Because of the way Canvas Import APIs work, changes that are only made in Atomic Assessments won't always trigger the Sync prompt for the blueprint. Something needs to also be changed in Canvas in order for Canvas to recognize that a change has been made to the course. An example of a change that would prompt a sync would be creating an assignment in Atomic Assessments since a Canvas assignment is also created with the Atomic Assessment assignment.

Configure course copy settings

To configure your course copy settings, click the triple dot menu in the upper right of the Atomic Assessments assignment manager and select the Settings gear. This setting will need to be configured correctly in the blueprint master prior to the first sync.

Accessing Settings in Atomic Assessments

Figure 1: Accessing Settings in Atomic Assessments

Setting Options

Figure 2: Setting Options in Atomic Assessments

Copies of the activities and items

When this setting is set to Copies of the activities and items, the assignments in the associated courses will have unique activity and item references so teachers can edit what they want without altering the blueprint master.

You can still make changes to the assignments and add new assignments in the blueprint. Those will be reflected in the teacher copies when you sync the blueprint.

Note: Teacher changes to Items will be overwritten to what is in the blueprint when you make a change to that same assignment and sync. Advise instructors to create a duplicate of the assignment before they make changes to the Items.

A read-only version of the original activities

When this setting is configured to A read-only version of the original activities, the assignments in the associated courses will have the same activity and item references as the blueprint master. 

Teachers will not be able to edit the assignment items and the Item tab will be hidden in those assignments in the associated courses. Teachers can change the assignment settings for these assignments. Changes made to assignment settings are specific to the course and will not alter the blueprint assignment settings. 

If the teacher wants to make changes to an assignment copied this way, they can duplicate the assignment to create a new deep copy of the assignment that they can edit without altering the original assignment. Teachers can also still create their own assignments in the associated courses.