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👷‍♂️Tips for converting old content to Blocks
👷‍♂️Tips for converting old content to Blocks

The best strategy for updating an existing legacy course to Blocks.

Laurie Garcia avatar
Written by Laurie Garcia
Updated over a week ago

If you've been teaching with Pathwright for a long time, we hope you are excited to use our newer Blocks-based content builder and convert all your old courses to the fresh new look and functionality very soon.

While it's a great idea to update your existing course content to Blocks as soon as possible, you'll want to be cautious about converting assessments in an active course.

🚧Caution: Any assessment questions answered or projects submitted will be lost if you remove the old version of the content, replace it with the new Blocks content, and publish it, or if you delete the step.

So if you're looking to upgrade an older course with a lot of history to Blocks and you don't want to your learners to lose access to their previous progress, answers, grades, etc. then we recommend the following approach:

How to upgrade content to Blocks in a new course

  1. Create a new copy of the course that you'd like to upgrade to Blocks. You'll find instructions for creating a duplicate course here

  2. In the copy, update each step to use the new Blocks format. Open the step and click the arrow in the upper right corner and select "Build with Blocks." Alternately, you can rebuild the content in a new step. Reference your original course as you rebuild the content inside each step with Blocks in the copy. You may find yourself combining and removing steps from the copy. That's fine too. 

  3. If you used the "attachments" option to include audio files, PDFs, etc. be sure to delete those old attachments and use the new Files Block.

  4. If you use an external video provider like Vimeo, Youtube, or Brightcove, you can still embed those with Blocks by using the Embed Video Block.

  5. Once your new version is ready, go ahead and set up all the pricing, access, and other settings just like your old course. Set this course to "public" or "members only" if you'd like learners to discover it.

  6. Change the cohort access on your old course to invite-only – this means that anyone already enrolled will have continued access, but no one else can enroll except by direct invitation.

Switching an existing step to "Build with Blocks" will remove the existing legacy content (permanently) and give you the option to build new content with Blocks instead. 

How to upgrade a single step to Blocks

If there are no assessments on a step and you wish to upgrade from legacy to Blocks without revising the entire course, you can safely do so by taking these steps:

  1. Make a backup of your content. Copy-paste text into a Word document, download images and files, and save any hyperlinks or embed codes.

  2. When everything has been saved, click the arrow in the upper right corner of the step and select "Build with Blocks." Alternately, you can rebuild the content in a new step.

  3. Now use your backup of the content to rebuild the step with Blocks.

Switching an existing step to "Build with Blocks" will remove the existing legacy content (permanently) and give you the option to build new content with Blocks instead.

Next steps

Now you're ready to build your content in Blocks!

We can help

If you'd like help in determining how to best rearrange and upgrade your existing courses to Blocks or would even like us to do it for you, our LX Team is standing by to help.

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