Export syllabi?

[jenn_stevens]

Something that drives me slightly bananas every semester is the problem faculty face when they're asked to turn in their syllabus to their department.

The faculty who try to get with the technology and create their class in Canvas complete with assignments, calendar, and all, have a problem when it comes time to turn it in. There is no good way to export the syllabus from Canvas, so do they then have to make a second syllabus just to turn in? Do they copy and paste the info from all of the different areas of Canvas? Do they create a bunch of PDFs and try to combine them?

Or do they decide this is too complicated and go back to keeping all the info in a word doc they link to on the syllabus page of Canvas (and then get confused over which iteration of the doc they are on or forget to replace it when they make changes)?

I made a feature request, and I would love if it could get some admin love:

 @hong_chau ​, this used to bug you as well - does it still, or have you found a better way around it?

[jpinto]

This is something my institution is struggling with as well. Have you come up with a solution that works for you in the ~ 2 years since this post, jennifer_stevens? I see some institutions are getting around this using Utah State's SALSA tool: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1328#comment-10614.

[jenn_stevens]

Not really - we're still struggling with a just right solution for this. Right now we're at the point where faculty who have been using Canvas since they were hired are now up for tenure/promotion, and they need to "submit their syllabi" as part of their tenure dossier.

As Canvas natives, all their assignment info (descriptions, rubrics) is contained in the assignments themselves, and they haven't bothered to go back to the syllabus wiki and enter that information in again manually because why would they? All of their discussion prompts are in the discussion themselves, etc. All that printing the syllabus page gets them is the boilerplate policies, some general info about the class, and a list of assignment and discussion names. They feel that doesn't offer enough depth to be considered a syllabus.

We've tried exporting the course as html, but that's really just the pages and module content so that students can study without internet. We've tried exporting as ePub, which is alllllllmost just right, but it's a lot of info, and the faculty members are worried that the people reviewing them will not be able to handle ePub files (which is a valid concern). The next step for that would be for our group to edit and save each epub file in a different format, which I'd rather not do, since it doesn't seem sustainable in terms of staff time.  One of the deans says we should just add every member of evaluation committees to every class the evaluated faculty has ever taught, which... just... no.

We've looked at SALSA, and it does make very nice looking syllabi, but then we're back to the issue of double entry: they'd put the assignment details in the assignment and then also have to put them on the syllabus page as well.

Right now our current solution is for them to control/command+P every page, which is not ideal for 2 reasons:

1) if the assignment has enough text that you need to scroll within the assignment description to see it, that text gets cut off when printing - though it does capture the rubrics fine.

2) it feels a little like I'm punishing them for using Canvas exactly how we want them to!

Our next step is to sit down with the administration and clarify what they consider a "syllabus", and put the various options before them. 

So no, I don't have any great answers - but here's where we are in the process of figuring it out!

[JACOBSEN_C]

Stanford has a handy utility that pulls syllabi from Canvas course shells w/in an instance and copies them into a publicly facing, searchable website (public to their campus - credentials to a login prompt are needed, ultimately, to see syllabi).  I've brought it to our IT dept's attention, as they have a handful of knowledgeable developers to tailor something, but we have been shot down because of [non committal words they say go here, words that ultimately mean no do it by hand - but let them know if we need a csv of something exported from a database].  We've given student advisors limited account level permissions to view content to all courses in the interim.  Chairs also have limited, read-only  access to all courses w/in their respective sub-accounts. HEA compliance is a big concern. 

[donna_lummis]

It's been a few years since this problem was posted so I wondered if anyone out there had a solution yet? We also need to keep an archive of syllabi files and would like to pull them from Canvas for this purpose rather than making instructors have to post their syllabus twice. I see the public facing form from Stanford linked in the post above, but it's the finished website and not something I can use. I thought someone had created a tool for this purpose that they shared with others to make this work. Now that I need it though, I can't find any record of where I read that. Our Canvas CSM said they didn't know of anything and suggested I ask here to see if someone knew of a solution.

[nsweeten]

Jenn,

Did you ever receive an answer to this?  Enquiring minds...have the same request!  😎