Behind the scenes - course activation

[r_v_jones]

Hi All

Not 100% sure if this is the right area but here goes. I thought it might be worth while sharing some of our Canvas developments in this community.

So the first covers our activation process here at the University of Birmingham for canvas courses.

We manage this though a webform on our servers. It allows staff to create courses that can be used for

• individual programme modules,
• programmes years,
• departments level UnderGrad, Taugh or Research Post Grad, departments year.

The above selections will automatically enrol students onto these course based on information from our student management system by using entering a course code matching the course code in the student records system

There is an autonomous which means a user can create a course without any links to users

When creating the course Staff can then specify the sub-account which is linked to the structure of our Colleges / schools. By selecting the sub-account they can also be presented with any pre-designed templates for courses that have been designed and agreed by the department or school.

Here is a link to a video produced by Trevor Batchelor who designed the system https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=S3pV71MsYXM

Hope people find this useful and I wonder how other people do this?

Thanks

Rob

[kona · Accepted solution]

This is great! We have something on the admin side that allows us to enter an instructors netid and all their courses for a given semester come up. We can then combine any that needed combined (per the instructor's request) or go ahead and create them individually. When we go to submit the request the system lets us know if the instructor is qualified to have the courses created - if they have completed the appropriate level of Canvas training. If the faculty member hasn't finished Canvas training then the course is created but the instructor isn't given access to the course until training is completed; this is all automated. When courses are created students are automatically enrolled in them.

Yet, it would be great if our faculty could create the courses themselves! I know we originally talked about doing the programming so faculty could do this, but we only have one part part time programmer helping us and other things came up.

Thanks for sharing!

[awilliams]

Hey  @r_v_jones , this is quite cool. I wish we had programming resources to do stuff like this! Would you mind if we converted this into a document instead of a question?

[scottdennis]

Hey Robert,

Thanks for contributing this.  I just went ahead and marked a correct answer for it seeing as it wasn't really a question as much as a cool share.  I also shared this into the newly minted UK Canvas Group​

[r_v_jones]

 @scottdennis ​ and awilliams​ I had posted as a question to get some responses, wasn't sure if the document would generate the same aspects

[scottdennis]

Hey  @r_v_jones ​,

You are certainly welcome to use either.  Its not like we have a quota on one or the other.    I suspect you'd get just as many comments on a document or blog post as a question but maybe I'm wrong.  I think the main strength of documents is that you can have versioning.​

[kona]

As someone who has posted a few blogs I can say that people have added their comments and information about what they're doing and the conversation is flowing like a discussion.

From my perspective when I read your post I thought it sounded more appropriate as a blog than a discussion. Why? Because you're discussing how your institution is doing something (amazing!) and sharing how it works. Yes, at the end you ask what other people are doing, but the depth of your initial posts sounded more blog like than discussion. Regardless, thank you for sharing!