I think this is a backup/restore issue but please advise if not.
We use the Upload Courses feature to create 170 courses each semester. Most of these courses have identical content (a required English as a second language class), so we duplicate a 200mb course template full of content to make each of the 170 courses. However, in Moodle 2.7, the Upload Courses feature adds four unnecessary blocks (Recent Activity, Search Forums, .... ) in the right column and scrambles the careful setup of blocks we had in the template course, putting all of them in the left. It seems to ignore the block setup of what was backed up in the course backup file (.mbz). How can we prevent that from occuring?
The undesirable workaround is to hire student labor for two days to manually remove these blocks one by one and reorganize our intended blocks one by one.
Another big issue is that in Moodle 2.5, this process was automated using a third party tool, allowing creation of multiple courses. Now in Moodle 2.7, this feature is now in core but only allows a single course to be created. Our site admin engineer is forced to do Upload Courses one-by-one, 170 times!