[ARCHIVED] Admins: Do you keep your old Canvas courses forever?

[rpsimon]

Hi, I am wanting to do some "cleanup" in my Canvas Admin Console as we have courses in there from 5 years ago as well as courses taught by teachers who are no longer at our school.  I am just curious as to what others do.  Do you keep your courses indefinitely?  Do you delete them after a certain amount of years?  Do you delete courses taught by teachers who are no longer at your school?  I am curious as to what others do.  Thanks for sharing!

[James]

rpsimon 

This doesn't necessarily have a correct answer as there are legitimate reasons for deleting and for not deleting them. The Community moderators may flip it to a discussion instead of a question.

We are a relatively small (less than 500 courses per semester) institution. We keep our courses indefinitely.

As a faculty member, I sometimes go back to the first course we taught in Canvas in Fall 2012 and look at what I did or pull information from it. I don't know that I would do that if I wasn't trying to answer questions for people in the Community, but it may be a year or more between times we teach some of our smaller classes, so having the ability to go back and see that in Spring 2017, I did this project and I want to reuse it this semester, is nice.

As an admin, we need to keep records for grade appeals and accreditation purposes (especially our health professions program). It doesn't matter whether it was a full-time or adjunct or even if the faculty member is now deceased. Doing a course export does not export user information, so if you need to be able to get back in at some point and see student information for the course, then keep it.

Some institutions are okay downloading a gradebook and calling it good. But deleting it will lose all of the submission data including timestamps. Some other systems automatically delete your course after a year (I think Pearson's MyLabs & Mastery did this). Deleting courses will keep a user's list of courses more manageable. It may even make Canvas run faster since it has less information to load. Others will come along and provide good reasons why they delete courses.

[rpsimon]

Thank you!

[rmurchshafer]

I'll second what James says and say that we have not deleted any courses yet and don't have immediate plans to.  Officially we say we'll keep courses around for 10 semesters beyond when they were taught and that is guided by academic retention policies.  However I know some of the colleges want us to keep them longer for accreditation purposes and we'll likely do that. 

I understand the desire to "clean up" but if you keep things organized with Terms and sub accounts it's not too difficult to manage.  We have about 4500 courses per semester.  

Hope that helps,

Rick

[rpsimon]

Thank you!

[hallmans]

I agree with Rick and James, if you have your terms set up correctly, its really easy to manage. We haven't deleted any of our courses since we moved to Canvas. Both for accreditation and our internal retention policies.We also have area chairs that periodically want to go to the wayback machine and see what was taught years ago and how those courses were evaluated vs the current faculty and their syllabi.

[rpsimon]

Thanks, @Steve_Hallman!  Is there a way that when I login to Canvas, I only see courses in the current term?  I didn't think there was a way, but I figured I would ask anyway.   

[James]

rpsimon 

Where would you like to see just the courses for the current term?

Canvas Admins can go to the Admin > Courses page and filter by the term.

For all users, the courses on the Dashboard are guided by the term settings found under Admin > Terms. When a term ends for a user, the cards are removed from the dashboard. Individuals can also pick their favorites to decide what to show on the dashboard.

[rpsimon]

Yes, I am aware.  I just always need to filter it, lol.

[GideonWilliams]

Hi rpsimon‌

I think the model for K12 is different for Post 12. We are making the decision this summer to delete a number of courses from previous years (terms). I have done this before in different LMS too. 

Was beginning to have an impact as Admin eg many courses with same names and also issues for staff managing courses. A lot of the same content is imported into new courses each year so there is a lot of duplicated content in courses not being used. 

If I remember rightly however, there is no easy way to bulk delete courses other than through API - https://community.canvaslms.com/thread/16989-mass-delete-of-courses 

[rpsimon]

 @GideonWilliams ‌ you hit the nail on the head!  Yes, a lot of the same content is imported from one course to another and sometimes it can present a problem to the staff when managing their courses.  This specifically happens when the "Direct Share" feature is used.  I told my teachers that it's better to enter the entire SIS ID course number rather than typing in the name of the course to ensure it is delivered to the correct year.

[GideonWilliams]

Thankfully one of our very clever people at school has written a script that integrates our MIS (SIMS) into Canvas so that the courses are created new each year and delivered to the digital door of the staff!

[James]

You may be right about the differences,  @GideonWilliams  . Early on, we started putting the term name in all of our courses because of the inability to tell them apart.

[GideonWilliams]

Had to do that with sub account names too as Heads of Department (who were admins) were playing guess the right year when trying to find a course...!

[rmurchshafer]

We also have the year/term in our course names at the very beginning.  We did this before there was an option to rearranged course tiles on the Dashboard so it would alphabetically group them by term.  Also trying to select the correct course when sending a message from the InBox was a nightmare if you didn't have the term/year as part of the course title.  I think things are better now for both of those cases but I still like having it in the title.  We keep it short using 20SP, 20SU, 20FA, etc at front of a course title.  

Rick

[laffoon_jan · Accepted solution]

To solve this issue, I created an inactive SubAccount and moved all inactive courses to this subaccount when completed at the end of the school year. The main account is for active courses only.  Doing it this way gives office staff a way to view only the current year's courses in the active account. However, they are still able to view previous courses in the inactive subaccount. This eliminates the need to delete courses if needed in the future.