Hoping someone can point me in the right direction with this one. Here's my situation:
We offer 8 types of workshops across the nation, and frequently have more than one of a type running concurrently or overlapping. We try very hard to offer a consistent experience for every workshop, which led to...
- A template course set up and hidden from students, to keep standard content consistent each time we run the course.
- The template course has a topic with activities (quizzes) and resources (files with index.html set as main page) which is hidden from students.
- Template has a topic with icon links and descriptions of the URLs of the quizzes and main pages of the resources in the HTML of it's description section.
This hidden topic is how I was told to set up a course if I wanted to present links to our resources/activities without having them in a long indistinguishable list or adding a topic for every resource and activity.
So far, so good. Then we back it up and restore it into a new course when needed, adding the unique content for that instance of the course and making it available to students and teachers. But then...
- Quizzes work perfectly in the new course - the hidden topic gives them a new URL (I assume this means it's made a copy into a system folder), the HTML in the visible topic picks up that URL and everything is lovely.
- File resources almost work in the new course - the hidden topic gives them a new URL, but the HTML in the visible topic does not update. It keeps the old URL from the hidden template course. This means that the course-creator staff have no problem seeing the file resource, but students are told that the resource is unavailable. So course-creators have been updating the links manually.
Ideally, I'd like the HTML to update for the file resources the way it does for the quizzes. But I'm not tied to any particular method here, as long as it allows us to reduce the effort for our course-creator staff because this is such a repetitive task.
Why does the restore process treat file resources and quizzes differently? Is there a better way to set this template course up so that new courses based on it require the minimum of fiddling? Or is there a better way to get pretty HTML links on a master-copy of a course?