[ARCHIVED] What is the best way to structure athletics in Canvas?

[smarshall1]

Our school is in the process setting up training sessions for Canvas, our recently adopted LMS.  One of the topics I have been asked to research is what is the best way to structure athletics in Canvas.  Our initial thought is to set up athletics as a course and then establish each team as a group.  I am wondering if this is the best practice, or is there a better alternative? 

We are also trying to develop a template that would assure that all of the teams have the same information available to the students, coaches, administration, and observants.  Your help, thoughts, and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[keyaiko]

Hi  @smarshall1 ​

I was wondering if you found a good solution. We are finishing our first year in Canvas and tried using it for Athletics, but I'm not sure we had a very effective set up. It was a lot of work for our AD managing the calendars for each team (each team was a course) and those not enrolled in the course did not have access to practice times. Did you end up making each team a group in one course? Did you find your set up user-friendly and effective in communicating with athletes, parents and community members?

[emily_beckman]

This is our second year with Canvas. We have minimum requirements for each athletic team but have found that as more coaches use it they are taking advantage of the system, some more than others. I will try to give you as much detail about the set-up as I can.

• We created Sub-Accounts - this helped with organization of the courses but also analytics.

• All athletic teams have a canvas course and we made them all Public. We did this because not all parents are observers but also because we wanted prospective families to see what our teams are doing.
• Minimum Front Page Information: Links to each team schedule, names of coaches and their contact information. Now sports can have more than that information but at a minimum that's what we currently require.  Example: Baseball, Softball
• We created an Athletic term, so the courses don't get mixed in with academic courses.
• The Activities Office "enrolls" the students into the courses after the students have registered/signed-up. The coaches or students can let the activities office know if their should be anyone added or removed. Once the students are added to the course their observer is automatically added (this doesn't work if you add observers via SIS import).
• Once students have been enrolled into the course and teams have been created the coaches or activities office can create "groups" for each team the school has within that sport and add the enrolled students to the correct group.

• The groups help with communication. You can then email the students of a specific to a group if and when needed. Announcements are great but those go to the entire course, only way to target your audience is to put the group in the subject but with email you can send to just the members of a group.
• Groups also allows you to create "assignments" that are specific to a group. So if the Varsity team has an out of town tournament and players need to pay for rooms you can create an assignment to help keep track of payment and only assign it to that group/team.
• It's the job of the coaching staff (head, assistant, manager) to keep the Canvas calendar updated. We export the game calendar that was created by the conference and import that into Canvas and then the coach adds in the practice information. Some coaches embed a google sheet into the course for extra information.
• The AD might help send communications about practice or game cancelations.
• We don't limit how the coaches/programs can use their course but we do have minimum requirements.

I would be more than happy to discuss or show people our set-up and why and how coaches have been using it.

[rislis]

Thanks for posting this, Emily!  I found it useful as I was working with my AD this spring.