Cross-listing Canvas Courses

[debbie_ellis]

We are getting ready to move from Blackboard to Canvas, hopefully starting within the next six weeks. What Canvas calls "cross-listing," we call "course merges." We have never used Blackboard's cross-listing tool. Before they even had a tool, one of our admins created a tool that merged course sections. The faculty member had to request that sections be merged because it was all done behind the scenes.

I don't think that we will be creating any custom tools for Canvas, so I wanted to know some of your experiences with cross-listing courses. Can only admins cross-list courses, or do you allow faculty to do their own cross-listing?

[rebecca_william]

We migrated from Moodle to Canvas, and we already had a similar - behind the scenes - system set-up to merge the courses in Moodle. We called it a "Meta course" because the term "cross-listed" on our campus is another thing entirely. So, we decided to use JS to hide the Cross-list button and continue with the request sent to use to do the work behind the scenes. Canvas has issues with student data when a course is de-cross-listed so we keep all the buttons hidden from instructors. How do I de-cross-list a section in a course as an admin?‌ I usually rename the sections slightly to include relevant information like times, lab locations, or secondary instructors, as is appropriate, so the instructors can use the section name more easily in the course.

We are a relatively small school, so this works for us. I could see where the handwork would get overwhelming quickly if there are thousands of requests per term. I have an API script I use sometimes for courses with many sections. It would be fairly easy to automate every request right from the instructor's submission, but I find that too often we need to check the UI to make sure the request is valid before we do the work anyway, so we do most by hand. Canvas makes it easy for my team to do the merge with just a few clicks and my instructors are happily requesting "Meta courses" in Canvas, even after two years with the new LMS.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi  @debbie_ellis ...

Cross-listing courses in Canvas is a permission that you can set at the account level.  You can choose whether or not you'd like your instructors to be able to cross-list courses on their own.  The documentation for setting these permissions is located at: How do I set permissions for a course-level role in an account?  Specifically, you'd want to look at the row for "Course Sections - add / edit / delete".

We do not allow our instructors to cross-list courses.  We take care of all requests that we get to combine (cross-list) courses.  How do I cross-list a section in a course as an instructor?  Cross-listing doesn't move course content from one course to another...it moves the enrollments from one course to another.  Once two or more courses are cross-listed together, you'd be able to look in the "People" page of the course to see which students are in one course section compared to another.

Hope this helps.

[kmeeusen]

 @debbie_ellis  

We do not permit faculty to cross-list at our school, and have some fairly rigorous criteria for doing so. We tightly control this process for FERPA reasons, and you can learn more about those FERPA concerns at https://community.canvaslms.com/message/42010-new-ferpa-requirements-for-cross-listed-courses?sr=sea... 

Kelley

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Like  @kmeeusen ‌ and  @Chris_Hofer ‌, we disallow teachers permission to cross-list (which also prevents them from editing sections) and have a request form for admins to do it for them.  If the sections don't meet together in the same classroom, then we have steps they need to take (us too) to keep the sections separate due to FERPA privacy considerations.

[jbuchholz]

Here are NNU we do not allow teachers, program coordinators, or program directors to cross-list courses at all. I modified the permissions for every roll in our instance of Canvas. We took the permission away after it became ridiculously problematic.  We now send out requests to our program directors and program coordinators 3 or 4 times a year to get the courses that they need to cross-list and we also set up parameters in which we will and will not cross-list courses. Also, if a course is listed in the course catalog as "combined with another course" or the course in question is the same as another course. For example EDUC**** and PSYC****.

Also, when I cross-list courses that are not listed as combined in the course catalog, I disable the People tab/index and I send an email to the professor to explain why (FERPA) this tab should remain disabled in the course. This is the best procedure that I have found that helps us keep in line with FERPA.

We have three admins here that can cross-list courses, but I am usually the one that does it. I also have a spreadsheet that I populate with all of the courses that are cross-listed throughout the year as this gives me a heads-up as we walk into a new semester. The people that send me requests for cross-listing know that they need to tell me what the parent course is and what the child or children courses are. For the most part, I have this down to a science now and things roll pretty quickly.

Jesse

[rebecca_william]

About FERPA and students seeing other students in a course. We are importing students in the SIS enrollment with the flag

limit_privileges_to_course_section

set so that all students can not see students in another section as the default. Most of our cross-lists are not the cross-listed in the catalog type, but in those courses I do let the instructor request that I manually combine those students into a separate section that is combined so that they can collaborate and work on discussions together. This helps us be FERPA compliant.