Reuse a course for the next term

Outcome You bring your teaching material into a new course space for the next term without manually re-uploading everything.

Before you start

• The previous course space still exists (active or archived).

• You have decided what to carry forward - typically the polished material from the Master Instance, not student work.

• You hold Faculty or Manager role so you can create a new course space.

The full cross-term workflow is covered as a tutorial - see Tutorials › Reusing a course for the next term in the Instructor tutorials. The tutorial walks through capturing the previous Master Instance as a snapshot, creating the new course, and cross-distributing materials.

If you need to reuse content from an Archived Course, there are two paths, depending on what you're trying to do:

• Need a few files, tables, or applications back in an existing, active course? → Distribute specific content from a snapshot.

• Reusing the whole course as the basis for a new course next term? → Clone the archived space when creating the new course.

Distribute specific content from an archived course

1. Open the archived course Space. You’ll see a message like "Space archived on YYYY-MM-DD Time: hh:mm GMT+1."

2. Click SNAPSHOTS. This lists all available snapshots of the course's Master instance.

3. Select the snapshot you want to restore from by clicking its tile. Snapshots are named after the moment the course was archived - for example, a course archived on 2026-03-05 appears as "Archived state as of 2026-03-05T14:12:04.275912."

4. Stage the objects you want to bring back - files, tables, and applications - and distribute them into the new course, just as you would in a regular distribution.

5. Let the process run. Restoring from an archive can take a little longer than a normal distribution, since tables need to be activated. You’ll see a notice like "Object distribution has been started. Because tables are activated, this operation might take several minutes. You will receive a summary email of the outcome." You can track progress anytime under Tasks.

Once the distribution completes, your restored content will be available in the destination course you selected.

Clone an Archived Course

1. From the Dashboard, start a new space either by clicking + SPACE, or by clicking the + icon next to Spaces in the sidebar and choosing Course.

2. Fill in the course name, short description, and space archival date as usual.

3. Under space contents, select Create space based on a template, then Clone an existing space, and pick the archived course's name from the dropdown - archived spaces are listed here alongside active ones.

4. Click ADD SPACE.

This method copies the archived space's files, tables, and applications. It does not copy instances or snapshots - student work and saved snapshots stay behind in the archived course.