Sharing is Caring

[chris_slupianek]

Canvas I will share an "Academic Apple" with the Instructional Design group.  Every beginning to an academic year is different than the other, however many things remain the same.  For instance our institution uses master courses that populate the online and F2F environment.  Every term we have newly developed courses.  I along with the departments review all new courses that were just developed with our great team of Instructional Designers.  While I am reviewing the newly developed courses I am working with the IDs and CDEVs on improvements to the course as time allows. 

Secondly because of our master course process we run a duplication test of all courses that will run that upcoming term.  The IDs and some instructors will then check for errors and try to correct before the term goes live.  This is the 3rd term we have had Canvas and will be the first term where we are fully integrated, so we do run into some errors from time to time.

I have weekly meetings with the ID team, online ops and the directors in our department to make sure things are going smoothly.  Correct textbooks in the course and our textbook system,  the developments are meeting there deadlines, payments for development, etc.

We work with the Departments to do "Spring cleaning" on the courses to make sure all content is up to date, manageable for the students/instructors, and follows sound pedagogy.  This takes most of the summer and some of the Fall to ensure all courses are ready.

Other than that we celebrate a new Fall term and happy to see the students return.

[jordan]

Great insight on your course management processes  @chris_slupianek ​! Thank you for sharing!

I have a few questions for you. How do you go about deploying your master courses to the child course that will be delivered by the instructors? Do you use the Canvas APIs, or Commons?

You mentioned that you run into errors. What kind of errors? Could you give any additional advice to avoid the errors you've encountered?

[chris_slupianek]

Hello Deactivated user,

We do deploy our children courses via the APIs in Canvas, I believe we run three different APIs.  One for the course creation, then content import, and last but not least set dates.  We have not invested a lot of time in the commons yet but what I have seen is great.

The errors that we have run into has been pretty minor, however minor does end up snowballing into disaster.  The first time through the dates didn't shift correctly, so the API had to be fixed and a few parent courses the dates were incorrect so that had to be adjusted appropriately.  The other minor issue has been links to files/images/etc being broke sometime during the content migration API.  The links appear to work in the parent but are lost/broken in the child course.  Troubleshooting that has been a pain because there are different issues with different solutions.  For example in one quiz the image links were all broke so if you were in the child course all you had to do (we found out later) was open the exam > edit > click save and voila the images reappeared.  However that didn't work in all instances, some we had to manually import and the links weren't broke, others we would try the manual import and the links were still broke.

There have been a plethora of VERY small issues but nothing that can't be fixed.  With all the errors that the team encountered or the faculty we tried to troubleshoot as much as possible before we escalated to the Canvas help.  Many were fixed by us others the guides/community then last but not least the help desk in canvas.

I believe the thing is we all think we are special with problems and we are the only ones that have these issues the fact is MOST of the issues that we run into some other College/University/School has already run into and there is a solution in the Community.  I am finding myself looking for more solutions here than anywhere else.

[jared_flaherty]

Hi-

I work with Chris and have some more information about our APIs.    

We do several APIs in this order:

At 28 days prior to a Term:   Terms > Courses > Content Migration (date shift = true) > Syllabus

At 21 days prior to a Term:  Instructor Enrollment

At 14 days prior to a Term:  Student Enrollment

Use of the Commons has been floating around my brain, however, I don't think it will work for us, as I doubt the module date shifting can occur.   We may use the Commons for hybrid course content management in the future.    We haven't turned Commons on in production yet... 

We setup our Masters with specific start/end dates and module unlocking, due dates, etc.    Then, when we throw them over into the live courses in the Content Migration API, they all (mostly) settle in just fine.     There is an issue with discussions... if we have an available TO date in the masters, it will throw it in Closed For Comments in the child/live courses (I call children courses Live courses).        We needed to have available FROM dates in the Discussion b/c the Syllabus view would allow students to access all our weekly discussion from the very beginning if we didn't have the FROM dates in them.       We use modules in all our masters and hide assignments/quizzes/discussion navigation options from students....