[ARCHIVED] Is anyone using Sandboxes?

[joseph_allen]

Is anyone using "Sandboxes" with their teachers?  If so, I'm interested in knowing how you create and manage them?  Do you populate them with templates or sample content?  Can teachers have more than one? How do you delete them?   Thanks!

[dwillmore]

We create a sandbox for all faculty that that utilize Canvas heavily and/or come to a training session.   We create different courses for development.

[scottdennis]

I do know of one school district in California where the high school teachers wanted an LMS but were told by their central IT dept that because they weren't doing distance education they didn't need and couldn't have an LMS.  They responded by using a combination of Google spreadsheets and free for teacher accounts to create their own sort of hybrid SIS and LMS.  The district eventually decided that they could have a centrally controlled LMS instance.

[dwillmore]

Wow! That IT department is far behind the times.   Do they still code on punch cards?>

[laurakgibbs]

Just as a follow-up to this very informative discussion: thanks to the very nice way faculty at my school can create courses on the fly, I was able to set up a workshop space for something I just found out about; details here:

https://community.canvaslms.com/thread/15712-favorite-toolssites-for-embedding-in-canvas-pages 

Meanwhile, I paid more attention when I created the course, and I learned something about how this is working at my school, which I think has to do with the account/subaccount admin set-up that people mention in this discussion (I know nothing about the Canvas backend). When I created this space, it went here: "manually created courses" ... which was a clickable link and, because I am a curious person, I clicked on a link, and saw that subaccounts have their own identity where they have a specified admin (it happens to our overall Canvas admin, the great  @kevin1 ‌).

Anyway, that was good to learn about, and I really like how this Community space lets faculty (like me) interact with designers and with administrators so that we can see things from different perspectives.

And, I'll say once again: allowing faculty to create their own course spaces on the fly is something I really appreciate! So, at least from a faculty member point of view, I can recommend it. 🙂

[dwillmore]

I would love to allow this laurakgibbs‌, but there is the issue of finite resources, an inability to enforce naming conventions for consistency/documentation, and a belief that it would eventually lead to chaos.   I know I am a dinosaur from the days of the Soviet Union and centralized IT that ruled with an iron fist, but I am a proponent of decentralization which allows for the maximum creativity and productivity of the individual.   

@Kevin_Buck How does your campus handle my three issues above?  Am I concerned needlessly?   I understand, Laura, that you are very conscientious in your use of the system, but I am afraid not all users are.

[laurakgibbs]

Hi  @dwillmore ‌, I hear you! I spent two years working for IT at my school (back when we had Blackboard and WebCT, to let you know how long ago that was, ha ha)... and I learned a lot then, appreciating back-end stuff I had never understood before.

In this case, though, I am not sure that letting faculty create courses is a problematic option:

1. finite resources: because faculty can create a sandbox if they want, or not, we don't have hundreds and hundreds of unused sandbox courses as would be the case if we went with what appears to be a popular option of creating sandboxes for all faculty, including those who don't want/need/use the sandbox

2. naming conventions: I'm not really sure how important that is when the manually created courses are going in a subaccount labeled "manually created" ... not part of our SIS, and not something that requires strict naming conventions as the official courses do...?

3. chaos: again, the use of the subaccount would seem to keep any possible chaos under control; to me, the biggest problem is APATHY, not chaos... my guess is that very few of faculty are taking advantage of this great option because the "spirit of adventure" is just not something that springs to mind with an LMS.

But thanks to Canvas open courses, I am certainly experiencing a sense of adventure I never felt with WebCT or Blackboard or D2L. 🙂

[dwillmore]

1. Finite resources include storage and time to support faculty concerning these courses.  We have a current course that is taking up more than 5 GB of space needlessly.   I have given the instructor many training sessions where I have shown him how to better handle his files and content, but, because there really is no "visible" problem the instructor does not spend the time to clean the course up.
2. Naming conventions are important to maintain the LMS and assist faculty.   As a simple example, there are 10 courses named test or something close to that name that is created by the same faculty member.   Which one of those courses matters to the faculty member?  You can name many courses with the very same name and it creates a huge mess.   This has happened here by those with access to create courses, and they are very well trained.  Recovering a deleted course when there are 10 named Test is a problem as well.
3. Chaos is probably a redundant point here, but it refers to the inability to keep the LMS clean and manageable.   Even if all of these courses are in a sub-directory, courses need to be maintained. 

There is more that I could say, but we would have a wall of text here that would really add little to what I am trying to say.  Maybe, I am simply being too concerned with this issue; too controlling.    Because of this discussion, I am actively talking to others on campus about this topic.  In the end, I want the best for our students, and to accomplish this I must provide faculty with the tools they need to construct the best instructional materials possible without limiting creativity.   This is my mantra.

[laurakgibbs]

Those all sound like problems that can be addressed as they arise (esp. faculty who are using too much space; it sounds like someone uploading videos there, in which case you would need to explain what other video platform you recommend to your faculty; at my school, we have Kaltura).

Just speaking for myself as a faculty member, it seems like the best thing to do would be to tell people what size limits may be imposed and to give guidelines about naming conventions. I like to think there is a real benefit to encouraging faculty to use Canvas in creative ways; that was literally not possible in previous LMSes at my school but now, with Canvas open courses, it really is possible for faculty to create, share, and experiment together.

I would personally put a very high priority on doing whatever we can to encourage that creativity, sharing, and experimenting. If you want faculty to make really good use of the LMS (and that's the goal, right? for the LMS to be used in powerful ways...?), then I think that should weigh heavily in administrative decisions about the back end.

I think the greatest danger with Canvas it might school is that our faculty are so used to the mind-numbing limitations of D2L and Blackboard, which we had in the past, that they will not even realize the power of Canvas for open sharing. More about my high hopes here:

Canvas for Everyone: Connecting and Sharing – Teaching with Canvas 

[kbickell]

We strongly encourage faculty experimentation & creativity - we just have the requests go through our department .Not unlike faculty needing to go through our registrar to reserve use of a classroom or through facilities to reserve a public room. It's all done in the name of maintaining order, not stifling creativity. We look at the management of our LMS in a similar way - not to be heavy handed, but to make operations, training, and support more consistent.

Does oversight take away some freedom & creativity? Sure, of course. But faculty & students are often thankful for our guidance in setting up their sandboxes, committee shells, department shells, etc in an organized fashion. And nobody is confused because they have 3 committee shells from 3 different semesters with the same name.

I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong, but I think there is more than one "right" way that can satisfy everyone's needs.

[laurakgibbs]

Agreed... although the classroom comparison is a really good one. Web space is NOT like classroom space. I don't have to share my Canvas space with other faculty the way I have to share classrooms. There can and should be far more freedom as a result, IMO.

In fact, one of the very saddest things about college teaching is the bare classroom walls, unlike the beautifully decorated and inspiring walls of so many K-12 classrooms where the teachers get to decorate in ways that create a positive space for learning, encouraging, inspiring, affirming, etc..

I understand why college classrooms have to be shared, but one of the reasons I love teaching online is that I think about my online classroom space as MY space, and I feel a sense of ownership about it... and I love to DECORATE, e.g.:

The Sidebar Never Sleeps: Live Content 24/7 

I would suggest that anything that can be done within reason to encourage faculty to feel a sense of ownership and independence about their online space is a good thing.

And that means things are NOT going to always be consistent, because faculty are different from one another... as are students.

And my response is: vive la différence. Especially online. 🙂

[abunag]

Upon request, we provide the faculty with a copy of a "dummy course", which has basic materials built in, and isn't specialized for the faculty.  Many times, if it's a group from a particular department, we'll add them all to the same course.  This course's purpose is solely so they can poke at the controls with no real fear of doing real damage.  And they can also look at how the interface works, how the HTML functions, etc, without any fear of it accidentally ending up in front of their students.

Then, the instructors can manually create courses if they want, where they can build stuff from scratch for transfer into their SIS-created courses.  Some departments give them some templates via commons, which they can download into those manually created courses.  However, most instructors end up creating right in their first SIS-created course, then transferring materials to the next semester's course once it's time to change over.

We currently don't have a policy about course deletion...we'll see how that ends up working.

[rswengel]

I have created sandboxes for my own courses for next semester / year so that I can add or test new components.  I have also created sandbox courses for training purposes for teachers in my building and in our district.  The newest course import features have made the use of sandboxes very practical since we can import individual or group components from the sandbox or from an old course.

[schachernp]

Where do you make these sandboxes?  Do you make them in your Production environment or in the other areas of Canvas?  This sounds like a good idea!

[kmeeusen]

Hi  @schachernp 

At our school we make them in Production, and every faculty user gets at least one. Anytime some wants more, we create them.

KLM

[dwillmore]

We make our sandbox courses in Production under a Sandbox sub-account.

[schachernp]

Why do you put them under a sub-account?  Does that separate them from your production courses?  Do they have the same permissions in the sub-account as the production courses?  

Sorry for all of the questions.  I'm learning so much about Canvas!!  Thanks for taking the time to respond!!

[dwillmore]

That is correct Pam, we use the sub-accounts to separate the courses.   I have a sub-account for sandbox, development, and an account for our own courses for training etc.    We try to keep our 'real' courses in their own sub-accounts.

[schachernp]

Do the Sandbox course show up in the Canvas Navigation menu similar to the Production Courses then?  

[abunag]

Yes.  As far as Canvas is concerned, they're the same thing.  You can star it to add it to dashboard, or unstar to remove it.

[kmeeusen]

Hi  @schachernp 

For a user, all their courses in an account will still display in their courses list regardless of whether or not they are in a sub-account. Sub-accounts are essentially invisible to all users except admins, and even then only through the Admin panels. They are a back-end organization tool, and can be very useful for a variety of reasons, especially in complex systems. For example, a university might create sub-accounts for each college or school, and assign a sub-account Admin to manage those sub-accounts. There is a nice Chart showing how this might work at What are accounts and sub-accounts? 

A sub-account is not need for sandboxes, but some folks might like to organize them that way.

Just to clarify the Canvasian lingo, "Production" refers to one of every hosted Canvas customer's three Canvas instances within their account:

• Production Instance: the main account where all live courses (including concluded courses reside).
• Beta Instance: Every hosted Canvas customer also has a beta instance where Canvas will first update with any releases so that they can be tested before going to your Production instance. The Beta instance is a perfect mirror (including all courses and enrollments) of your Production instance. The Beta instance will reset every three weeks (with some rare exceptions). Any changes made to your Production instance will be reflected in your Beta instance when the Beta refreshes, but changes to the Beta instance will never be reflected in your Production instance.
• Test Instance: the Test Instances is also a mirror of your Production Instance, and is used by your school's Canvas admins to test various things such as LTI tool integrations, API calls, CSS code modifications, etc. Your Test instance is also reset every three weeks. Any changes made to your Production instance will be reflected in your Test instance when the Test instance refreshes, but changes to the Test instance will never be reflected in your Production instance

I hope this helps,

KLM

[schachernp]

Thanks for Replying everyone!!  The info is GREAT!!!  Thanks again for helping me to understand!!