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Inherited Course Audit and Rebuild Plan

What the course actually covers, what it assesses, and which stated outcomes nothing measures, before you teach the first session.

River reads the course you were handed rather than asking you to describe it. The syllabus goes in, along with the slide decks, the assignments and whatever export came out of last term. What comes back is an account of what the course covers now. A register carries one row per artifact, naming the outcome it serves and where it disagrees with the syllabus. Alongside it sits the list of stated outcomes that nothing in the package assesses.

The usual advice for an inherited course is sound: open every assignment, review every exam question, read the discussion prompts, and do not stray far from what your predecessor intended until you have. Rebecca Barrett-Fox puts it well in her guide to teaching an online class you inherited. That reading is the whole job, and it arrives in the week before term alongside everything else. This tool does the reading and hands you the results.

Built for the instructor handed a section days before it starts, the adjunct teaching a course somebody else designed, and the coordinator keeping several sections consistent with each other. A syllabus alone is enough to start; what it cannot settle becomes a question for whoever still holds the course. If you wrote the course yourself and want to know what to update first, the course update review works from evaluations and results instead. When two documents in the folder state different things, reconciling them can come first.

The package carries the parts and not the joins

A course export is an interchange format, and an interchange format represents some things and not others. 1EdTech's Common Cartridge specification is blunt about which. Questions within a question bank cannot be referenced by any assessment in the same cartridge. An assessment is one flat section holding its own copies of whatever it delivers. The package can carry the bank. It can carry the exams. It has nowhere to record that this exam drew from that bank.

The same document does something sharper with the word rubric. It lists Question Rubrics among a question's parts. It then prohibits that element on the object it defines as a question, and describes the field which does survive as one supplying instructions rather than criteria. An instructor who checks the specification reads a homonym and concludes the grading rubrics came through. What actually survived depends on the container. Blackboard's own export does include rubrics associated to assignments, so this is a fact about the format rather than a fact about your course.

Which leaves the question of what governs when an artifact and the syllabus disagree. Accreditors answer it without mentioning a syllabus at all. NECHE requires an institution offering multiple sections of one course to ensure consistency in learning outcomes across them. Outcomes are the part you inherited. Delivery is the part you choose. That line decides every row in the register, and it is why the verdict column reads agreement with the stated outcome rather than which file was saved most recently.

How it works

Send the course
The syllabus plus whatever came with it: last term's export, a shared folder, or the live course shell's files.
Read the package
River opens every artifact, reads the manifest, and works out what each item is there to teach.
Rebuild the joins
Each artifact is matched to the outcome it serves and to whatever assessment actually tests that outcome.
Decide what changes
Outcomes are fixed by the department and delivery is yours. The register keeps the two apart.

What you get

One row per artifact: the outcome it serves, what assesses that outcome, and what disagrees
Every stated outcome that nothing in the package assesses, named before you teach a session
Bank questions already used in a delivered exam, separated from the ones still unused
Where an artifact contradicts the syllabus, with both sides quoted so the conflict is visible
The gradable items the export carries, and the dates it does not, marked absent
A reading order, so the artifacts that settle the most questions get opened first

Common questions

Four files have syllabus in the name. Which one is current?

The filename cannot settle it and the folder date cannot either, because copying a folder to a shared drive can rewrite every date at once. Queen's University's naming standard asks that a name let you identify a document without opening it. Inherited files rarely are, so the run reads the contents and says what actually differs between the near-copies.

I was handed a PDF of the syllabus and nothing else. Is that enough?

It gives you the contract and none of the evidence. You get the stated outcomes, the assessment weights and the schedule as written, with every row about coverage left open. The gap list becomes questions for the coordinator. An export, or last term's live shell, turns those open rows into findings. Where the syllabus itself needs rebuilding, the course design template computes the outcome-to-assessment join forward.

Did my predecessor's grading rubrics survive the export?

That depends on the container, and the specification is easy to misread. Common Cartridge lists Question Rubrics among a question's parts, then defines the field that survives as one carrying instructions rather than criteria. Blackboard's own package does include rubrics attached to assignments. The run reports what is present in what you were given, not what the format permits.

Can it tell me when things are due?

Not from a cartridge. That format carries whether late submission is allowed, the attempt limit and the time limit, and it does not carry the date a thing is due. The run lists every gradable item, marks the dates absent, and names where they have to come from: the syllabus, last term's live shell, or the department's copy of record. Inventing one would be the worst available failure.

The slides cover things the syllabus never mentions. What now?

Record it, and keep teaching to the outcomes. Accreditors expect consistency in learning outcomes across sections of one course, which makes outcomes the part you inherited and delivery the part you choose. Extra coverage is not automatically a problem. Coverage that has quietly replaced a stated outcome is, and the register shows which is which.

Does it tell me how to teach the course?

No. A slide deck records what was shown, not what was said over it. The teaching does not travel with the files, and this makes no attempt to recover it. Recovering it means recording the person, which is a separate job with its own gaps. What the materials can settle is coverage, assessment structure and where an artifact conflicts with a stated outcome.

Sources

Built by

Chandler Supple

Co-founder & CEO, River

Chandler has spent the last six years working in AI, building tools for millions of users and Fortune 100 companies. In 2025, he co-founded River to build a new kind of operating system for AI agents.

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Reviewed by

Brian Joseff, Co-founder, River

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