Course Request System

[canninga]

We will be creating all courses in Canvas approximately one month prior to the start of each semester via SIS Import from Banner to Canvas. We would like to provide our instructors a way to request that courses for which they are the faculty of record in Banner be created early if they would like to have more time to build. We want to avoid making them build content within a sandbox and then copy it over to their course once it comes over via the SIS Import. Is anyone doing something similar? Would you be willing to share what you do?

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello there, @canninga ...

Our process isn't exactly what you describe.  We also use Banner as our SIS (Student Information System).  A member of our IT team (who works closely with Banner) works with our team to send over course shells and student/instructor enrollments from Banner to Canvas.  When a new semester of courses is coming up, he usually uploads that list a few months (at least) in advance.  We also have a "Master Term" where we typically have a "master" course that should be used to copy content from there to a given semester course.  In our "master" courses, an instructor is usually assigned with the "Teacher" role.  This person is the one responsible for keeping that course "master" up-to-date in Canvas.  We also created a custom "Viewer" role (which is based on the "Teacher" role ... with some permissions turned off).  We enroll other instructors in "master" courses with the "Viewer" role.  They are allowed to view the course content, but they cannot edit those "master" courses.  However, they can still import content from the "master" courses to their own semester courses.

What are some of the challenges that you are anticipating with not letting your instructors copy content from a "master"/sandbox course on his/her own?  For us, sometimes instead of importing from a "master" course, our instructors choose to import from a previous version of their course instead of the "master".  This sometimes leads to course content that is quite different from the "master" because of changes made by the instructor to his/her own copy of the course over time.

I'm not sure if any of this is really helpful or not, but I thought I'd chime in with a quick summary of our process.  Hope this helps in some way.

[canninga]

Hi @Chris_Hofer,

Thank you for this information. It gives me some things to think about, which is definitely helpful.

In addition to the challenge you mentioned of instructors copying from the wrong site, one of the challenges I foresee is that we don’t have many standardized courses. So, we could potentially have a master course for every instructor for each course they teach. I could see this getting out of control and unmanageable quickly.

We also considered creating all courses through the SIS Import from Banner to Canvas a few months earlier so that faculty would have plenty of time to perform any copies and content updates. However, we often run into delayed course cross-lists, which result in a lot of manual cleanups. The earlier we create all courses, the more delayed cross-lists we’ll be dealing with.