Help desk?

[NancyMelucci]

I have a problem with my Canvas LMS for a class the community has no solution for. I need help from a professional IT person. The thread directs us to "contact the Instructure Help Desk," but a search of this site shows no link to that thing if it exists. I need help from a professional IT person, NOT peer help. Where is the HELP DESK? Does it even exist? Not everything can be fixed by peer advice, which is one reason I am not a huge fan of Canvas. So much support is off-loaded to the community when professionals are needed. It makes me feel quite insecure, and this LMS is penny-wise and pound-foolish.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @NancyMelucci,

The options you have for getting support for Canvas depend on a couple things...

First, are you using free-for-teacher Canvas, or a Canvas instance set up by your school/institution?

If you're using the free-for-teacher Canvas, support will be pretty much limited to peer support here in the Instructure Community.

If you're using a school/institution Canvas instance, you should likely have access to additional support options, but those to depend on what your school/institution has decided to provide for a support structure.  Some schools have a local help desk staffed by their employees that you'd contact and report issues.  They'd then escalate questions which they cannot answer to Instructure.  Other schools may provide users direct access to Instructure support, which is usually done through chat or a phone call, but having this level of support available does generally come at an additional cost so not every school/institution will have this option.  Some schools/institutions are a hybrid combination of these two methods.  Finally, I suppose there may be some schools that choose to offer no support at all for their Canvas instance, though I'd imagine that would be exceedingly rare.

If you can let us know which of the two main buckets you fall in, we may be able to get you more support info.

-Chris

[NancyMelucci]

I am using it through school. I am waiting for a response. Somebody here thinks there is an Instructure help desk, which I interpreted as different than my school help desk. It appears that in this case the shell is "broken" - I teach 4 classes at this school and the others do not have this issue.

NJM

[chriscas]

Hi @NancyMelucci 

If your school subscribed to Instructure support for faculty, your local help desk should know about that and be able to give you the contact info.  In general, each school gets a dedicated contact phone number, and the support agents verify the subscription when you call in (so people can't try calling the number for another school to get help that way).

I know you said your issue needs a professional IT person, but would you mind telling us what exactly is going on?  Some people here, like myself, are Canvas admins for our schools and have a decent amount of knowledge.  It would be very rare for a course shell itself to be "broken", but rather it would be some kind of content inside the course that perhaps is wrong.  if you could give us more info, someone may be able to help.  Sometimes the answers you find through search are a few years old and may not apply anymore.  In addition, many people have gained knowledge over the years, so what someone may have written 2 or 3 years ago may not be what they would say today.  Just want to try to provide some help in the best way we can here!

-Chris

[NancyMelucci]

1) The MODULES and ANNOUNCEMENTS Links in the left hand nav bar are invisible (without my making them invisible using navigation). Attempts to make the visible (repeatedly) are failing, including dragging them to the actual disabled section, saving, and then dragging them back to visible, and saving again.

2) The shell will not accept the import of the course file from last semester. I've done this many times and I know what I am doing. 

The two other courses I have been setting up so far have neither of these issues.

NJM

[chriscas]

Hi @NancyMelucci,

For #1, just to clarify...  Are modules and announcements totally invisible, or have the slashed eye icon?  As a teacher, they'd have the slashed eye, even when enabled in course navigation, if there is no content in those areas yet.  You may already know this, so I apologize if that's the case and this is not the issue.

For #2, does it give you an error message when you try to import?  I've run into various edge cases with file imports in the 11 years my institution has had Canvas.  Your school may have changed the available course space recently, making the old course unable to fit (this would be most likely if you put videos in your files area).  Your school could have updated some 3rd party integrations which your old course used and could be interfering with the upload, though this would generally just cause affected assignments to error out and not the entire import.  Just a couple ideas here, but I agree that for something like this it would be good to have someone else be able to look at the course with you 1-on-1, which we generally can't do here in the community.

I apologize for your issues and the frustration getting support.  Hopefully your local help desk is able to pull through soon!

-Chris

[NancyMelucci]

I added a dummy module to empty Modules. But I still cannot see it.

IT is attempting the course copy for me. I'll see if that changes it.