[ARCHIVED] Has anyone archived Canvas after a school year?

[joseph_allen]

So as the 2015 / 16 heads for a close in June, it is occurring to me that we may need a snap shot or archive of all the assignments / grades in our Canvas instance.   I know that teachers still have access to their content after the class concludes, this is more about us having to re-use grading periods for summer school and next school year.  Once I remove this year's grading periods, all of the grades and assignments will consolidate into one big grading period and no longer be accurate, hence my urgency to take a snap shot of everything before I do that.  Parents have the right to contest grades for months and sometime years after courses conclude, so we need the back up of assignments and grades from given courses.  It would be much more difficult to piece together without the grading period piece in place. 

So....

Have you archived all of your grades and assignments in a given year?  If so, how did you do it?

[clong]

Hi Joe,

We do this by doing two things:

1) We create fresh courses and section enrollments for teachers anytime there is a new official grading period. For us this is Fall & Spring Semester and for some classes Quarters 1-4.

2) We use Terms to define the start and end dates these courses will have. This determines the level of access students and teachers will have after the course ends. We typically give teachers 2 extra weeks after the term ends to work on their grades but after that the course goes into an archived state for them (meaning they can read but not edit) and everything is automatically preserved. Grades, Discussions, Assignment submissions, the whole ball of wax.

To me grading periods just complicates the whole issue and leads to problems further down the road. One is the course fills up with too many items, it becomes hard for certain pages to load and things can get cluttered fast. The other reason is for archiving and having the integrity of preserving the courses at the grading periods.

Here's also a current discussion of this that topic that I'd also recommend looking at. How do you get courses ready for Year 2?

Hope this helps!

[joseph_allen]

Chris,

Thank you for your thoughts. Grading periods certainly does complicate things and it may be leading to challenges hence my overall question about archiving, but it also saved our bacon big time because our district would not function if we couldn't easily delineate each quarter's worth of grades for teachers, students, and parents.  Grading periods provides that for us.

On your first point, we are in year 1 of Canvas, so I would say that we will have fresh courses / sections for next year, however in our K12, we decided early on that it is probably not practical to use terms for each quarter of a year long course because in a typical 4 quarter, year long class, then the teachers and students would have to go to a new course each quarter.  The burden is probably highest on teachers migrating their content and the SIS team to re-do all the enrollments.  Are you guys doing that, or is it a simpler scenario?  On your second point, I completely agree.  Terms seem to be a very flexible feature and we do use them to the greatest extent we can, but again the quarterly grade and year long course continuity with minimal Canvas maintenance of a class for teachers are our two highest priorities.

[clong]

I can see how making 4 classes (one for each quarter) could be a burden and problematic. Most of our courses are 18-week long semester based terms so we make 2 a year and it works out great!

We do have some courses (mainly our PE) that are setup as 9-week quarter based courses. This is because students are awarded credits every quarter, rather than at the semester. While this is not ideal, the practice does match what we do and I have had zero complaints about it. For our IT/SIS it's not a big deal because they just run a script that generates a CSV file that gets uploaded to Canvas. Our teachers don't really have an issue with it either because they don't have to go back and import content the students have already done, but to be fair these are mostly PE courses.

If I could pick the ideal setup, it would be 18-week semester courses across the board.

Hope this helps!

[joseph_allen · Accepted solution]

 @clong ​

Just to close the loop, so we have decided to take a snap shot in time of Canvas on the last day of school.  Instructure will put that snap shot on another server that will as our official archived copy of everything that happened in this school year.  We will keep the copy for 3 years to comply with state law in case any one challenges how grades were determined.  We would have all of the student's assignment and submissions throughout the year.  We will do this after SY1516, SY1617, SY1718 all on different servers (which we will have to pay a little extra).  This provides us peace of mind and the legal back up we need. 

[clong]

All kinds of options! That's sounds like a great solution Joe. Thanks for sharing as I'm sure others will find this information useful