Entire Module Disappeared from Course

[TrishaMeyer1]

i am trying to resolve an issue for one of our teachers. An entire Module disappeared first from her Sandbox course and some time later from her actual published course. Why would this happen? All the other Modules seem to be unaffected. I tried the /undelete feature, but nothing showed up.

One thought I had was that perhaps it contained copyrighted material used without permission. But I've never heard of such a thing happening. Would Canvas remove content without notifying the user?

[Chris_Hofer]

@TrishaMeyer1 ...

That sounds pretty odd.  I've never had a module disappear on its own before.  I would think someone would have had to manually click on the option for the module to manually delete it from the course.  The module should still exist in your Canvas "test" or "beta' environment.  Have you tried looking there?

• What is the Canvas test environment?
• What is the Canvas beta environment?
• How do I access the Canvas test environment as an instructor?
• How do I access the Canvas beta environment as an instructor?

Don't forget to log out of either of these environments before returning to your regular "production" environment (the environment that you normally log into on a daily basis).

• How do I log out of Canvas as an instructor?

You might want to contact Canvas Support on this.

• How do I get help with Canvas as an instructor?

My $0.02 for what it's worth.  Hope this helps a bit.

[TrishaMeyer1]

Thanks, I don't have the ability to get into the test or beta mode right now. Someone else is working on that, but I noticed that there are no Assignments labeled as being in that Module, and there are no "orphaned" assignments, either. They are all assigned to Modules, just not that one. Even if the user accidentally deleted the Module, wouldn't the Assignments still be available on that tab? It seems EVERYTHING has just vanished.

[Chris_Hofer]

@TrishaMeyer1 ...

Yes...even if you removed the module, all the content that was in that module would still be available on the "Pages", "Discussions", "Quizzes", and "Assignments" index pages.  The "Modules" page is just the area to build all the content from those other areas of your course.  Still...this sounds pretty strange.  By chance, is the course set up as a blueprint course?  Or, was the course shared to Commons and so there might be a "master" that was changed and then pushed out to the course in question?  Just trying to rule out some other possibilities.

I still think a call to Canvas Support would be a great idea here.  Keep us posted!

[TrishaMeyer1]

Apparently someone was able to recover the content from the beta mode. I still don't really know what happened. Sorry I can't provide more details. It's a mystery to me why everything disappeared.

[TrishaMeyer1 · Accepted solution]

Final update to this thread - it was the result of user behavior. Thank you for your suggestions and advice!