Courses contain a lot of content. Links, files, reading lists, assignments, tests, lessons, and so on... and to make your courses as useful to your students as possible, it's good to throw it all in there.

But what if you have four sections of Business 201 to run, and the course is the same this year as it was last year? How are you gonna get all that content into this year's courses? Are you gonna go download all of that stuff and then re-upload it into each section? Sounds like fun!

That's why Populi courses have had cloning and syncing from the get-go. Cloning lets you import content from one term's course to another's. Syncing lets you share content among sections of the same course in the same term. They save you a ton of work: no re-uploading, no tiresome double-checking, no Did-I-remember-everything? night terrors. These features let you share the items you'd otherwise spend the most time creating: assignments (and groups), faculty-created discussions, files, lessons, links, books, supplies, and tests.

Cloning

There are a few ways to clone course content:

When an Academic Admin is adding courses to a term, they have the option to Import Courses from any other term:

When doing so, they can simply import the courses, or also clone the course data (that is, the content)—as you might guess, this gets a lot of work done in just one step:

Course instructors can also use the clone feature once they're assigned to teach the course. In the course's Info tab, just click the gear, select the items to be cloned, and go for it:

Academic Admins have an additional option here: they can clone content over from different catalog courses. If you need materials cloned from, say, MGMT201 into BUS201, just ask an Academic Admin user to do so.

Sync

If you have multiple sections of a course, you can sync them. Syncing not only lets you share content among course sections—it also automatically updates all sections if you make a change in any of the sections.

It's simple: in each section's Info tab, just check "yes" for sync.

After syncing sections, you can also un-sync them (just un-check "Sync") and then modify the content for each section. The synced content won't go away, and now you can edit it without affecting the other sections.

Read more about it

This article in the Populi Knowledge Base gives you all the details, plus a few tips.