What is the best way to restrict a course site to teaching staff only during exams?

[jesslyn_boiscla]

We are trying to figure out the least time-consuming way to hide course material from students during exams to mitigate cheating. Ideally, there would be an option for 'teaching staff only' in the course visibility settings. The only option we are coming across is to un-publish course content individually, but that would be tedious for teaching staff to identify the relevant course material. Has anyone else come across this? Are there any other options that I'm missing?

[kona]

 @jesslyn_boiscla , do students take their exams in the Canvas course? If not, then it would be much faster to close the whole course until the exam is over. Also, couldn’t the students have saved or taken a screenshot of the content that they could then use during the exam?

[rebecca_william · Accepted solution]

We use the course settings to hide course material in courses that instructors want temporarily unavailable.  The trick is to set an "End Date" in the course before the test date/time, check that "Users can only participate in the course between these dates" and check the "Restrict students from viewing course after end date" boxes.  Then, remove the end date and change the visibility settings back again after the exam period.  We have never had any issues with this workaround, but I would love to hear if anyone else has a more elegant solution.

Refer to these help topics:

• How do I change the start and end dates for a course? 
• How do I restrict student access to a course before or after the course dates? 

Students get this error message:

This workaround only works for paper exams.  The entire course is unavailable during the time you have these settings activated.

[jesslyn_boiscla]

Thanks, Rebecca. This is great. It would be nice to have a more elegant solution but I think this will be a sufficient workaround.

[lars_vemund_sol]

Hi,

a small enhancment to this reply would be to adjust the start date of the course to a date after the exam. Then you would not have to come back to reset the dates after the exam.