Is there a way to move/copy blocks to other lessons or sections?

Nov 14, 2016

Hi

I got a bit carried away (having fun!) and was adding all my blocks to one lesson. I now want to move or copy some of the blocks to a separate lesson or section. Or can I duplicate an entire lesson (and delete the extra blocks)? Is there a way to easily do this that I'm missing? Thanks. j

107 Replies
Nicole Legault

Hi David and Susan!

Thanks for sharing that solution David!

Susan - the solution offered up by David of saving the block as a template, and then bringing in that template into another lesson should accomplish what you need.

If you'd also like to submit a feature request for the ability to copy a block to another lesson, please feel free to submit one here. We always appreciate feedback and comments from our customers. 

Tonie Miller

Allison,

This was super helpful, thanks! I have an additional question about branching with separate quizzes at the end. Since the tracking only allows for one quiz, I have several questions:

1. If I add a link to the duplicate material in order to have the branch access the quiz, how

I assume I need to duplicate the course and add a link to the quiz in the duplicated material in order to overcome the issue of only being able to select one of the quizzes when exporting to an LMS, however will the LMS still be able to access the second course material and how will calculations work in the copied course? - Do I change the settings to 100% course completion?

When I added the url to the duplicated course, after the quiz, the second branch just stalls and does not move to the summary slide.

Andrew Donnellan

Hello! This is good but it's only good for copying whole projects into another project. Is there a way to copy specific blocks from one project to a specific section of another project? For example, I have a project on blood-borne pathogens that has a section about transmission whose blocks I would like to copy into another project's subsections. The only way I can do that now is by going to the transmission blocks and creating a template with all those blocks and then going to the other project's subsection and adding the template. Although this works, it is very tedious and time-consuming because you have to select each block individually to add to the template which can take a long time if you have a lot of blocks you want to copy. Is there a way to select all blocks at once to add to the template or is there a simple way to bypass the whole template step and copy those specific blocks directly into the other subsection. If not, this would be an awesome feature to add, a huge productivity booster, and a huge time-saver! Thanks! :-)

Allison LaMotte

Hi Andrew,

I'm sorry you're finding it tedious to use the block template feature. Right now, that's the only way to copy blocks from one lesson to another. Would you be up for logging a feature request to tell us more about your specific needs?

In the meantime, if there’s anything else I can do to help, please let me know! 

Lei Weeks

Hey Articulate, though I find copying a lesson useful and am glad you did it, really, copying a block between courses is a much more common use case for me. Requirements below.

Use case:
There have been many, many times I want to pull elements of courses into new courses, but not entire lessons.

Issue 1: It is a lot of work to copy a lesson and delete everything out and build around it, especially if I've already started building a lesson and decide I want to incorporate a block I had in another course. In addition, if I decide, well, I'll just copy and paste the content from this block to the lesson I already started building, for blocks like labeled graphics, timelines, tab interactions, basically all of the common interactive blocks, this is a pain in the butt, repositioning all the markers, finding the images/media all over again if they're uploads and not link-based, etc. These simply aren't "copy and paste-able."

Workaround for Issue 1: Lots of time spent :( And perhaps more storage on your part, eh? With me having to upload the same files in multiple places? $$$ saver?

Proposed Solution for Issue 1: My assumption is you've already got code that's copying lessons you can use parts of, and presumably every block has an ID, so then it's a matter of just figuring out how to map the ui and your database to ask, "which lesson do you want this to go in?" or "create a new lesson with this block in it." The former of these asks will lead to the need for the solution for issue 2 below, as well. I know this means new code which is a lot heavier lifting, but it would make us rapid-devs so much rapid-er!

Issue 2: 
This also speaks to the difficulty of moving blocks around once you've got a lesson that's even more than five blocks or so long (please give us a reorder blocks option that is not one click at a time!).

Workaround for Issue 2: My workaround ends up just zooming so far out that the long blocks don't take as much scrolling to move.

Proposed Solution for Issue 2: It's sort of silly I can't drag and drop or just literally give them a number order.

Allison LaMotte

Hi Lei,

Have you tried using block templates instead of copying lessons and deleting the extraneous content? It sounds like that would be a good solution for the first issue. Here's an article that explains how those work.

Thanks for the feedback on the difficulties you're having reordering blocks. Would you be up for logging a feature request to tell us more about how you'd like that to work?

In the meantime, if there’s anything else I can do to help, please let me know!