How to: multiple Parent Catalogues?

[BarryBEATTIE]

Hi. We're just starting to look at Canvas Catalog for our large complex government organisation. Ignoring our existing "Bread'n'butter" P-12 student learning using Canvas, we'll have both staff training and also governance-based compliance training for all education providers across our region (ie: not our staff).

I envisage we'll have at least 4 top-level catalogues of Canvas Catalog, each benefiting from using a different "Path" URL to differentiate. These 4 top-level won't have any connection between them, completely different branding and configurations. Each of the 4 will have multiple sub-catalogs.

Because of the desire to differentiate the 4 top-level catalogs, is it feasible to make each a "Private Catalog", deliberately not utilising the inheritance from the Domain Catalog, to set up the "Parent" for each to then create their respective sub-catalogs? I can't really see a need for 
www.(subdomain).(orgURL).

but can for
www.(subdomain).(orgURL)/Catalog1
www.(subdomain).(orgURL)/Catalog2.
www.(subdomain).(orgURL)/Catalog3
www.(subdomain).(orgURL)/Catalog4

... for each of the business groups responsible for their own listings.

(the other side of the coin is differentiating admins for their own parent catalog but no other ... but that's for later)

Thanks

[Reed8W]

You can put a Catalog Item in multiple Catalog Categories, but you can not put a Catalog Category in multiple Catalog Categories.

[nwilson7 · Accepted solution]

@BarryBEATTIE for what it is worth, we are employing a similar setup.  We have a portion of our Catalog that is for completely outside people not otherwise connected to our institution and that has its own sub-domain with its own branding and admins.  Its unique URL is what is linked on our website so when people click to go to it, they do not see courses not associated with that sub-account.  I have another section that is purely for our faculty and staff and has custom javascript to force our users to login with their institution email (I block links from working until they are logged in and hide the ability for them to create new accounts).  This is also a sub-domain of the root catalog.

Hope that helps!

-Nick

[BarryBEATTIE]

So love this. Thank you. You understand exactly, @nwilson7.

our default domain URL from the Catalog install is a million miles long, so we're going to use our vanity URL for our Canvas LMS and add a subdomain for the Domian/Root catalogue.

I was just thinking this morning that we could prefix all four business-unit-based "Parent" catalogues as Domain catalogs with a different subdomain in front of our vanity URL, or purchase another vanity URL (or two) from Instructure. That could be the basis for distinguishing "internal" vs "external" users.

Your point about logins and accounts is worth considering: we'll start with our organisation's SSO for internals that currently works sweet with Canvas LMS. I don't yet know enough about the native Canvas accounts for identities that we'll probably use for externals (if we can't find another identity store we can hook into for authentication), and of course with many tens of thousands of potential users, we'll probably have all sorts of combinations.

Thanks very much for your input.

[hechla]

Nick, this sounds very interesting. We wound up using a separate Canvas instance for our non-credit offerings that are open to the public, not just our "students" at the institution. It sounds like your situation might be similar enough that I might be able to figure out how to get back to one Canvas instance and allow all of the necessary authentication. 

Can you share with me more specifics of the custom javascript you use?  Thanks.

[nwilson7]

@hechla I have continued to make tweaks to our settings since posting this and some of the newer features (such as limiting registration to a domain) may take care of the some of the things I did with scripting.

With CSS, we hid all of the registering form stuff so that did not show at all to our faculty/staff (happy to share our scripts)

With JS, we put a warning message about this course being just for our Faculty and Staff and directed people to login before trying to click enroll.  We did the same thing on the registration page if they got to that without logging in.

Again, there are now probably better ways to set this up since we did a few years ago but it still works well for us.  It has completely stopped all the duplicate accounts people were making by creating new versions of themselves to take the classes we asked them to take.

Hope this helps!

Nick

[BarryBEATTIE]

And as far as admins, the easiest way seems to be

1. assign our newly created Canvas root account "Catalogue Admin" (with the "Manage Catalog" permission) to our Level3 support staff
2. get the "Catalogue Admin" to assign initial "Subcatalog Admins" to selected staff to manage their respective parent catalogues

... and away they go...

I can't see the use-case for someone external/non-staff to be a subcatalog admin, nor the subcatalog admin do more than create and manage course listings... but it's early days...