@caccornero , @Chris_Hofer gave good advice, which prompts me to tell yet another story, maybe even two.
I already talked about our attending the 2012 InstCon as prep for getting started with Canvas. When we returned from Park City, Utah, we were incredibly excited and ready to get rocking and rolling with our Canvas instance and setting up our pilot - this was second half of June. Unfortunately our State Board and Canvas were not ready. days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months and our Fall term pilot was looming. We had a dozen brave faculty read with something more than 30 courses they were willing to try. We had scheduled our faculty training date, and were starting to panic. Finally, the Wednesday before our schedule Monday faculty training, we got our instance. Between Wednesday, and Monday morning we enrolled our faculty, created empty course shells, set up the term, built some test students, enrolled them via CSV, and taught ourselves enough of the faculty side to do our Monday training. It was that easy!
Learn what you absolutely must to get started, then work your bottom off learning enough to keep ahead of your fist group of victims (oops, I meant volunteers). Long before your second term, you will be much better prepared for a larger rollout!
@ProfessorBeyrer mentioned enrollment management, and he is sooooo right! This is an area you will will need to figure out rather quickly. For this we had the advantage of being part of a state system with five colleges participating in the pilot, and a state geek working on an integrations for our state student information system (SMS); which, of course, would be piloted right along with our Canvas pilot. The integration would create the section shells in the term, and enroll the faculty and students. With the first integration run, we immediately noted that the state's course naming convention would not work with the short course-name fields in Canvas. Faculty would not see the section numbers and term designators, and we recognized that this would be a problem as the numbers of course grew in each user account.
So, consider your course naming format. Keep key identifiers withing the first 15 spaces or so. Canvas has since improved many of these field (Like in the Inbox) with expanding hover-text, but it is still challenging. We get many inquiries, questions, concerns, feature requests and outright complaints in this Community from folks who are challenged finding the correct courses - start out with this as a consideration. Here is an example from our own format.....
HIT105 2522 - F19 - Comprehensive Medical Terminology
And here is what it looks like in the user Courses list..
And here is what it looks like in the Conversations Inbox when addressing a message......
As you can see, the term designator is hidden, but at least you can find narrow down to the correct course ID, and hover text helps with the rest.
You are going to have so much fun on this new adventure! It will more fun than a barrel of monkeys!
Kelley
