by Julie Grundy.
Thanks for the suggestion Chris! Unfortunately it gave me the same result - the new course updates the hidden file link, but not the visible one in the HTML section of the first topic.
I'm going to look into keeping our reusable content in a file system repository, so it's stored once and linked to by an alias rather than copied to each new course. But this doesn't seem to play nicely with our mini-sites, so I'm still open to other methods.