The seed of this feature started from a simple enough question posted recently to the CA user’s group:

Is it possible to merge two courses into one in CA?

The person asking this question has six courses that are already great as standalone experiences, and she wanted to combine them all in order to offer a membership experience wherein all of that material could be slow dripped over several months.

It’s a cool idea!  And if one could quickly make this happen on the implementation side of things, without having to do a lot of cumbersome copy-and-pasting, one would be much more free to play and experiment with such ideas.

I could have quickly tossed off a utility for appending one course to another and called it a day.  But from that simple notion of merging courses, I came to realize it might be a lot of fun AND enable a whole new degree of creativity (when it comes to CA Courses as both ready-to-offer coaching products and powerhouses of automation) if there were a way to operate on, combine, and generally mix-and-match course content in a more fluid and flexible way.

Voila, the result: Course Builder Power Tools.

Power Tools are available with just a click when in the Course Builder:

Ooh, what’s this? No harm in clicking it.

There are 5 types of operations available:

Ooh, these could be fun!

Click on one, and some pretty controls with intuitive sliders appear.  Here, for example, is what it looks like to import from another course:

Pick a course, select the part you want import, choose where to put it.

The article on Course Builder Power Tools in the CA Knowledge Base goes into full detail of what you can do and how these controls all work.

I’m excited for what this makes possible.  If building courses is more fluid and allows you to quickly change your mind and remix things, creating courses will not only be easier, but you’ll start to create different kinds of courses, ones that are less hampered by inertia and the need to have it all figured out in advance.  The ability to merge in entire segments of other courses, coupled with Resource Packages (which make it possible to share and install courses made by others coaches) opens up a wide range of creative possibilities, drawing from and cross-pollinating with the work of your previous courses as well as courses made by other coaches willing to share.

Here’s to the joy of creation!