Our Custom "Viewer" Role for "Master" Courses

Chris_Hofer · ‎02-17-2017

In this blog, I'll explain how our College uses a custom "Viewer" role in conjunction with "master" courses. This blog expands on part of a Twitter chat conversation I hosted on Tuesday, February 14, 2017 called #CanvasChat: Managing Masters. But first, some background...

At MPTC, my team (Instructional Technology) gets approved course curriculum from our Instructional Designer/Curriculum department to build into the LMS. We take the course curriculum built in WIDS (an online curriculum building tool) and put it into the LMS. For the most part, our team builds the curriculum for our faculty and adjuncts so it is ready for them to teach at the beginning of the semester. Most of our instructors do not build their own curriculum into the LMS themselves. One of the reasons for this is to have a consistent "look" and "feel" for the courses that we build...so that students have a general idea of where they need to go to access parts of their course. If instructors build content on their own, there is high chance that course "A" will look different than course "B", and students would have to figure out where to navigate around the course. We wanted to avoid that. Additionally, we found that this consistency also has helped our retention rates.

When we moved to Canvas, we wanted to mimic a similar setup we had with our previous LMS, Pearson eCollege’s LearningStudio, by way of Canvas Permissions. We decided to create a custom role (How do I create course-level roles in an account?) called Viewer. This new role was based on the "Teacher" Base Type. (This was the only way we found that instructors could import content from a "master" course.) For our Viewer custom role, we turned off almost all permissions, but we kept the following turned on:

Create student collaborations
Create web conferences
Moderate Grades
Post to discussions
See the list of users
Send messages to individual course members
View announcements
View discussions

Some of these permissions might not really apply, but that's what we've got set right now. The custom Viewer role can only view a course. Instructors assigned this role in a “master’ course cannot make any edits to the course content.

We work with our Deans and their Administrative Assistants to determine who gets access to “master” courses in Canvas. In general, we typically have one full-time faculty member (sometimes two or three) who is the person responsible for keeping a course up-to-date in Canvas. This person is assigned the Teacher role in the “master” course. Then, other faculty and adjuncts in the same program area are enrolled in the “master” course with the Viewer role. This allows for collaboration among the team. Based on student and instructor feedback, an instructor with Viewer rights can talk with the instructor who maintains the “master” to make any suggested or needed changes to the course.

If you choose to do something similar at your school/institution, be aware of one minor thing. When instructors are enrolled in "master" courses and then look at their "Courses" >> "All Courses" screen, they will currently NOT see the custom name that was created by the admin. Instead, they will see Teacher listed under the Enrolled as column. I submitted a Feature Idea about this issue in April 2015, but it's been put on Product Radar (New Ideation Stage: Product Radar😞 https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1097" modifiedtitle="true" title="Custom Role Name on "View Al....

kona · ‎02-17-2017

Right now our Online Learning staff are the ones copying over content from master courses over into regular courses for adjunct faculty and I think this would be a great way to put more power (but not too much!) into the hands of our adjuncts! Thanks for sharing this!

kmeeusen · ‎02-17-2017

Hi @Chris_Hofer

This is an interesting approach! What I really like is that this is not a one-size-fits-all template approach; but rather that each course-master is individually designed for that course. You are correct that consistency improves retention, and I suspect that after this system has been used long enough you will also see improvements in persistence and completion.

I do have a couple questions.............

At the section level, to what extent can the teachers modify the content to suit their instructional style?

If the answer is "Not at all", then what resistance have you faced from faculty, and how are you dealing with that resistance?

One more question - is this model used (or intended to be used) for all online courses taught by all online faculty, or is it limited to adjuncts?

Thanks for sharing this!

Teach

kimwithroder · ‎02-17-2017

The technical college where I work is used to master course templates and this approach will allow us to continue that practice. Thanks!

Chris_Hofer · ‎02-17-2017

Hi @kmeeusen ‌...

At the section level, to what extent can the teachers modify the content to suit their instructional style?

Once an instructor imports content from a "master" course, they can modify the Learning Activities (typically non-graded) as they need to. (For example, a course may be written to include activities for both online and traditional face-to-face learners. An instructor may have to hide a few activities based on the delivery method of the course.) In each Learning Plan (module) of the course, it begins with an "Overview" page telling students about the material that will be covered as well as listing the competency(ies), criteria to be met, and Learning Objectives. That information typically isn't modified unless there are revisions to the curriculum. Assessments (Assignments) are tied to the competencies, so in general, instructors shouldn't be changing these too much, either.

One more question - is this model used (or intended to be used) for all online courses taught by all online faculty, or is it limited to adjuncts?

Once a course is built in our "Master Term", our full-time faculty and adjuncts can import/copy the course to their online, blended (hybrid), or even their traditional face-to-face course shells. The other option they have is to import/copy content from a previous course. However, there are times that changes to a particular course curriculum are significant enough that a re-build of a course is necessary for us, and so once we complete the re-build, instructors should be copying/importing from the "Master Term" again.

kmeeusen · ‎02-17-2017

Thanks @Chris_Hofer

That's very helpful!

So it sounds to me like there is enough flexibility built-in to cover teaching style, delivery modality and more; and yet it also provides for that very necessary consistency for your students.

I think your faculty will find that this availability of masters will be very helpful for them

Shorter prep time between terms,
Consistent reference points to troubleshoot student support,
Easy updates and revisions for the small stuff,
Assessments and other graded activities aligned with outcomes, and
more.

You mentioned outcomes, so I am wondering if you are also using the Learning Mastery Gradebook?

Kelley

snugent · ‎03-31-2017

@Chris_Hofer ‌ How much training was required for both the master editors and viewers? Was there resistance to this master model at first? How much standardization is enforced? For example do all courses have modules as the course home? Or do you allow faculty to choose their desired home page option?

Chris_Hofer · ‎03-31-2017

Hi snugent‌...

To be honest, I don't recall how much training was required. As I indicated in my blog posting, we first started doing this when we were still using Pearson eCollege's LearningStudio. (LearningStudio didn't always let instructors copy their own content...it was added as a feature several years after we had partnered with eCollege.) We first met with one of our full-time faculty members and did some testing with her (to make sure this would even be a working possibility). Once we confirmed that things would work the way we wanted them to, I'm sure we sent out e-mails, went to faculty team meetings, etc.

One of the challenges for my team was that before we implemented this in LearningStudio, faculty needed to let us know (via a Google form) what content they wanted copied from a past course to an up-coming course. But, we didn't always hear back from everyone by our established timeline, and so that left us sometimes guessing what an instructor wanted. And, as you might expect, there were times where we were asked to clean out a course and copy different content. So, I think after we introduced this ability to our instructors, it was a welcome addition. From time to time, we would get questions from our instructors because content didn't appear to copy correctly. Sometimes, that was because an instructor was trying to copy FROM the current course TO the current course (basically copying nothing into nothing). We could easily tell when that happened, and we could help them through how to correct it. (And, we find that this still happens a bit today in Canvas...but not quite as much.)

As far as standardization, we have a small template that we use when building a course which includes a very basic home page used as a "Welcome to Class" (really needs an update since we've basically been using the same thing for many years), a set order of the course navigation buttons, and then a basic template for what our Modules page should look like. This is recommended for all our online and blended courses. For our face-to-face traditional courses, we don't monitor those as much, and instructors can build courses how they want. Over the years, students in face-to-face courses have asked their instructors to use the LMS to post files, have areas to submit work, etc.

Hope this helps, Susan.

snugent · ‎03-31-2017

Thanks @Chris_Hofer ‌. We are started to investigate using master courses and I don't know where to start.

ysmalls · ‎04-24-2017

Working at a K-12 we encourage teachers to create master course or sandbox courses. What we found out is that teachers like to add other teachers to their master/sandbox course but then that other teacher can modify, add and delete content from the course that technically does not belong to them. We create a custom role called "Teacher - Copy Only" in which gives that teacher access to view all content in that course and import to their won but not modify the other teachers courses.

I'm wondering if you guys have Commons turned on? If so would that not help in making a master course available to your users? I ask because we don't currently have Commons turned on but figure that would help in this area?

Thanks

Chris_Hofer · ‎04-24-2017

Yes...we also have Commons, but we haven't been utilizing it for "master" courses at this time. That would be a discussion we'd have to have internally before we decided to go that route.

Chris_Hofer · ‎02-14-2024

Just posting an update to my original blog post from seven years ago since the names of permissions have changed slightly. As of today, these are the permissions that are enabled for the custom "Viewer" role (again, based on the "Teacher" role type):

Announcements - view
Conversations - send messages to individual course members
Discussions - view
Student Collaborations - create (optional)
Users - view list
Web Conferences - create (optional)

To test out the "Viewer" role:

Enroll a dummy account in a Canvas course with the new "Viewer" role.
Enroll the same dummy account in a different Cavas course with the "Teacher" role.
Masquerade as the dummy account in Canvas, and enter the course where the dummy account is the "Teacher".
In the course, click on "Settings" >> "Import Course Content".
Select "Copy a Canvas Course" from the drop-down menu. You should see the course listed where the dummy account is enrolled as a "Viewer".