Archiving a Course with Student Data?

[casey_eubank]

As an admin, am I able to archive a course that includes the student data via the GUI or an API?  I a aware of the new K16 archiving solution but was wondering it is possible to do it outside of that vendor.

Thank you in advance for your help!

[Hildi_Pardo · Accepted solution]

I guess I would need to understand better what is meant by "archiving."   

All our courses remain, with student data, after courses end/conclude.  They get moved to Past Enrollments which for our district is, in essence, archived.   There are some settings that can be changed where students can or can not view content in a course after it concludes; our default is to allow them to view content (they cannot view quizzes after a course concludes).  But this setting can be changed in the course.

[Hildi_Pardo · Accepted solution]

I guess I would need to understand better what is meant by "archiving."   

All our courses remain, with student data, after courses end/conclude.  They get moved to Past Enrollments which for our district is, in essence, archived.   There are some settings that can be changed where students can or can not view content in a course after it concludes; our default is to allow them to view content (they cannot view quizzes after a course concludes).  But this setting can be changed in the course.

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi @casey_eubank 

If you mean "archive" in the sense that some other LMSs (like Blackboard) allow, where you can save everything included course contents, student data, grades, etc. to a file that can be saved into a backup storage system and imported back into Canvas later, then no, there's not really any built-in functionality to do that.

[JasonSimmons]

Hello Coach Emeritus!

You may not be aware, but that is exactly what K16 Solutions offers. We are a close partner with Instructure and are powering their current Canvas Archiving solution (link below). Institutions can back up, access, and retrieve Canvas course content and data at any time.

Separately, we also offer institutions the ability to archive their legacy LMS data on our platform, which is integrated with Canvas so institutions can access their archived legacy LMS data as needed.  The data does not sit in cold storage and is accessible with a click of a button. 

For the latter, we typically archive legacy LMS data for institutions as we're helping them migrate to Canvas from another LMS.

I hope that helps.

https://www.instructure.com/services/canvas-archiving

https://www.k16solutions.com/product/scaffold-archiving/

Best,

Jason

[mzimmerman]

Hi @JasonSimmons 

If you look at the original post, they specifically mention that they are aware of K16's tool, but were wondering if there were other (presumably built-in) options.

[JasonSimmons]

Thanks, Coach Emeritus.  Then correct, Instructure doesn't offer that currently; K16's archiving solution is the only solution on the market that provides a Canvas-integrated archiving solution for legacy LMS data and aging Canvas LMS data. There is also the option to put it in cold storage / zip files, but that's not really a viable option for most.

[LEASUSAN]

So what do you do when you want to get old courses out of Canvas but still feel the need to keep them? We have some truly ancient legacy content that's past its retention mandate, but we're still wary of fully deleting. How would you recommend we handle this? Thanks!

[mzimmerman]

@LEASUSAN 

When you say "ancient legacy content", are you referring to actual course content, or are you referring to student submissions/activity/grades?

[LEASUSAN]

I believe it's old course content from the system we had before Canvas. I spot checked a few courses and didn't see any student data.

[mzimmerman]

In that case, you could just do a standard course export and save the content.  The issue that started this thread is more about the problem of trying to preserve student data, since Canvas doesn't have a built-in way to easily export and save that.

[LEASUSAN]

Ok, great. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything obvious. Thanks!