Course Creation Best Practices

[lukekm]

When we do the automatic course creation process from our SIS, our current process is that all courses default to being Published.

I'm curious as to what other schools (Higher Education) do and pros/cons. For us, by having the courses default to being published, we get fewer calls from students confirming if they are enrolled in a class, plus it's one less "click" for faculty to "Publish" their courses. On the other hand, if a faculty member chooses NOT to use the platform for their teaching, and leaves it published the data seems a little skewed.

Thanks in advance for your input.

[mzimmerman]

Hi @lukekm 

We create our courses as "Unpublished".  This allows instructors to choose when (or if) they want to make the course available to students.  Students can still see the course under Courses > All Courses even if it is unpublished, and we put up an announcement at the start of each semester reminding students how to do this.

[dbrace]

Hi @lukekm,

Before my institution was a Canvas customer, we used an LMS (it no longer exists) that did not require faculty to "publish" a course shell. The course shell was immediately available to students when its start date and time occurred.  We got a lot of support calls if a faculty member was not using the course shell.

As a Canvas customer, when our course shells are created by our SIS to LMS data transfers, we do not automatically publish them.  We tell students to check their enrollments in either our SIS (for real-time status) or in Canvas at Courses > All Courses (within 24 business hours). We get support calls because of students not reading announcements and because of misleading/inaccurate information shared by faculty (e.g. even if published beforehand and a faculty member wants students to be able to, we do not allow students to get into a course shell before it is scheduled to start).

My Department's preference continues to be to not automatically publish course shells and this is mostly for consistency when providing technical support to faculty and students.

-Doug

[RachelSalmon]

If a faculty member is building out their content/assignments ahead of time, they may not want students to have access to what they're doing as they are working on the course. Being able to build with assignments/pages/modules all set up in a way that you want so that when the course is published everything is ready to go, is helpful. If you have to build but keep everything unpublished, faculty might miss something when they go to publish individual content. Our institution defaults to unpublished for this reason. We do see some support calls from students who don't see their course ahead of classes start but we have anecdotal evidence that our faculty like having control of when students can see the courses. 

[dbrace]

Good points, @RachelSalmon.

-Doug

[melodyc_lam]

Hey @RachelSalmon I'm not sure if your institution creates Terms or have them come through the SIS but this is were the Term access dates really help; in our district we default to unpublished but if a teacher publishes a course early (because they're done or because they'll forget otherwise) the students won't be able to access until the first day of school. Term access dates are granular so you can set up different dates for different roles. Students will see their enrollment but won't be able to access the course through the Courses -> All Courses page under Future enrollments.

[RachelSalmon]

Hi @melodyc_lam, we do use terms but we do not restrict student access ahead of the term start. Students are able to view published courses as many instructors, especially in our graduate programs, like to allow students to see the home page, syllabus, and welcome module a few days ahead of time. If a school wants to restrict access though, that can be a really helpful way to be able to have courses published without worrying about student access. 

[SusanNiemeyer]

At my district, our courses are unpublished until the instructors publish them. I definitely do not want my students to access my courses until they are ready to go. Note, for example, that an instructor's syllabus will go live once the course has been published, regardless of whether the instructor has fully created it. Do you really want students to have access to unfinished syllabi? What a nightmare!

We are reminded to publish our courses a few days (2 to 4 days) before the semester begins, and that's not been a problem. Students don't need earlier access. 

Trust that your instructors know enough to publish their courses. 

[lukekm]

Thank you for all of the responses to my question! It appears that most default to courses be UNPUBLISHED for a variety of reasons. I appreciate your points - I'd love to hear from anyone that defaults to courses being PUBLISHED and what your reasons for doing so are. Thank you!

[cms_hickss]

We create our courses in the "unpublished" state so that students cannot access the courses while faculty are still working on the content. But, we do auto-publish our courses (early) early on the first day of classes so that they are available. We also have a syllabus policy requirement that states that the syllabus most be posted to a published canvas course on the first day of classes.

[chriscas]

Hi @lukekm,

My institution has an approach that is basically a blend of published and unpublished.

Our SIS processes create Canvas course shells for faculty 8 weeks ahead of the start of a given term.  The shells are unpublished, and faculty are free to start importing content from prior semesters, building new content, etc...

We do not allow faculty to adjust individual course dates at all, and use Canvas terms to define the dates to match our policies.  In practice, we restrict students from viewing course content prior to one week before a term.  That means that even if faculty publish the course as soon as it becomes available (8 weeks ahead of time), students will not be able to access it until the week before the term starts.  In addition, we do have a script that will auto-publish all courses with enrollments starting on the first day of each term, so for faculty it's kind of "ready or not, your students are going to have access to the course on the first day of the term."  Finally we have custom code to prevent courses form being unpublished once they are published.

All of the above rules/policies were developed over time to address either faculty issues, student issues, or just for decent regulatory compliance.  For example, before courses were auto-published on the first day of the term, support lines would be inundated with calls from students asking why they could only see 2 of their 4 courses in Canvas.  Similarly, before we had the one week ahead restriction in place, we'd get complaints that students were being asked to submit work weeks before the term/course even started, and also that content was switching around as instructors of record sometimes need to be changed at the last minute to accommodate course schedule/demand changes.

I hope the info helps!  This is definitely an area where there doesn't seem to be a "best" answer that works universally, rather something that likely develops organically at every individual school/institution.  I would say that I feel it's best to have school/institution-wide rules around this though, and don't allow individual departments to come up with their own rules, as that's almost impossible to support in a single system like Canvas and just causes so much confusion for students.

-Chris

[Jeff_F]

Hello @lukekm - permit me to share our practices:

1. courses are created for faculty 45 days ahead of term start. They are unpublished.
2. faculty guidelines provide structure: for asynchronous and synchronous courses, these are required to be set up no less than two weeks prior to term start. That includes at least one announcement, instructor contact information, a biography page, completed syllabus, availability dates set for midterm and final exams, assignment due dates verified.
3. courses are published for student access one business day ahead of term start. This is typically the Friday morning before the Monday term start. We use an API script to change the course state.
4. also, as we use the course participation date set for the date of the actual term start, students can read the content but not post discussions, assignments, etc. until the actual term start date.