Best Practices
In 2013, NOVA Online adopted the higher education best practice standard of creating course sections from master copies (commonly referred to as templates or master templates, though "master copy" is the official term used at NOVA Online). In the following years, NOVA Online streamlined the use of master copies and integrated course section creation (or course copies) with the course schedule in MyNOVA. The majority of course sections are no longer copied one at a time or by faculty, but instead are created automatically from their corresponding master copy.
You might enter a section months before the start of a semester and find that it already contains content. This is due to the automatic course creation process from NOVA Online master copies. Course creation occurs far enough in advance of the semester start dates to give NOVA Online staff and faculty adequate time to check and prepare the sections. For more information about this continuous process, see the Annual Timeline.
According to VCCS policy, faculty developers and NOVA Online share joint ownership of NOVA Online courses. When developing or making changes to NOVA Online courses, both faculty developers and the NOVA Online instructional designers use Canvas development sites. If you would like access to a course in a development site, please contact OnlineIDHelp@nvcc.edu.
Development Sites vs. Master Copies
A development site is a working copy of the course. All course design and revisions occur within the development site. When a course is complete and ready to move to production, development site contents are copied to the master copy of the course. Unlike development sites, master copies are not to have IDs or faculty enrolled in them or making changes to them. This is because the master copies are used to copy the live sections before each semester. NOVA Online adopted this practice in 2014 to follow higher education best practices and ensure that there is always a backup of each course where changes are not being made.