There are lots of different ways we've tried to save authors and organisations time by encouraging reuse. The options range from small and relatively simple (copying a task to use later in the same course) to the slightly more complex (sharing courses between organisations).

In this article, we give a summary of all the different methods and examples of where you might use each.

When authors are adding a task into their course, they can choose to create a new task, or copy from existing.

The most common use of this feature is to easily reuse (and or tweak) earlier tasks as revision tasks later in the course either on their own, or many bundled into a quiz. A big time-saver.

If there is a particular task or page set up that you use frequently, starred pages is the way to go. Starred pages lets you add your favourite and most-used pages to a list. You can then pop an entire page into any of the courses you are working on.

Starred pages if very useful if you use the same structure/layout for tasks. For instance a task that uses the same reflection structure each time.

Authors can duplicate any of their courses to create a copy. But if there is a course you want all your authors to be able to copy (and use), Templates is the way to go. Simply create your template/exemplar course and add it to the Templates tab.

Templates can of course save time, but they're also especially useful for increasing consistency between courses (which is great for learners!). We have seen our partners set up their own templates with introductory pages, structure for reflecting, and revision summaries. Check out What should go in a template course for more ideas.

Another great benefit of templates is that you can easily keep the central template updated so all authors always have access to the latest version of the template.

Our next option has sharing between multiple organisations. Course catalogues lets you share a course with other organisations that any of their authors can create a copy from and then contexualise.

You can create courses for the catalogue in the same way you would templates for your own organisation - with exemplar text and structure. Or, you could use the course catalogue to support content reuse across organisations so each of us don't need to recreate the wheel if we have similar courses.

The Course catalogue (described above) allows authors to make their own copy and edit courses to contextualise. But as soon as individual copies of a course deviate from the original, we can't push updates to the copies. So, if what you're after is to share a course with other organisations that isn't edited and gets any updates automatically, what you want is Licensing.

A licensed course is a linked copy of a course. The recipient (licensee) of a licensed course can activate classes from it and those classes will automatically receive any updates the owner (licenser) makes to the content. The licensee organisation can personalise the class activation details, but not edit the content of the course.

There are a whole range of ways to copy and reuse content depending on your needs. If you're unsure which one is right for you, just ask us in the in-app chat or us our contact us form.