More Granular Options for Importing Site Content

Sakai users often request the ability to selectively import a subset of items from one site to another during the Site Info > Import from Site process. Currently, it is an all or nothing process for items within a tool. You either import all of the Lessons from a site, or none of them. The same is true of other tools containing multiple items, such as Assignments, Tests & Quizzes, Resources, Discussions, etc.

In practice, this means that instructors or site owners are often forced to import everything from another site, when they really only wanted a handful of items. After importing everything, they then have to go through all of the content and delete the items they don’t want. This can be laborious, not to mention confusing, particularly if there are any similarly names items in both the copied site and the target site.

There are some workarounds for bringing over individual items, such as exporting and importing individual quizzes from Tests & Quizzes, or using the newly added ability to copy a single Lessons page from another site (SAK-47706). However, these options are also not always ideal, since they ONLY let you do one item at a time. If you want 5 quizzes out of 20, you’d need to export and then import them one at a time - repeating the process 5 times. If you want 3 Lessons pages out of 15, you would have to repeat the process 3 times, once for each individual page. Also, there are some items that don’t copy when you copy a page individually this way in Lessons (i.e. LTI links or the content on subpages of the page you are copying).

I would like to propose a more granular approach to the selection of items for copying via Import from Site. This would allow instructors or site owners to have more control over the content they copy from one site to another, and save lots of time deleting things that were unnecessarily copied in the first place. Ideally, when selecting the tools for import, the user would also be able to expand a given tool and select a subset of items within that tool if desired.

For most tools, this selection process should be relatively straightforward. However, for Lessons, which also contains links to content within other tools, the import will need to be smart enough to also include items from other tools which are linked on the selected Lessons pages. For example, if you select Lesson Page 1 to be copied, and that page includes Assignment 1, Quiz 1, Discussion 1, and links to 5 items within Resources, then all of the associated items in those other tools should be automatically selected for inclusion when the Lessons page is imported.

I’m including rough mockups of what the Import from Site content selection screen might look like.