How can I remove or "archive" old courses and or terms from the admin view

[RobertaBain]

Our college currently has every course and term from the beginning of time in our system.  When searching for courses in the admin view, courses from "day 1" appear and we need to either have the exact name of the course, search through a ton of "terms" or the exact link.  This is incredibly cumbersome when we are associating courses at the beginning of a semester or trying to find a specific course.  

Is there a way anyway to hide old unneeded courses and terms from view?  For instance, we like to only see terms and courses for the past 2.5 years on our courses list and when associating courses, only seeing the terms for the past 2.5 years.  

Since there is no real archive process in Canvas , what do other schools do that have large amounts of courses and a lot of terms/semesters in their systems?

[chriscas]

Hi @RobertaBain,

I have seen some discussion recently of creating an "archive" subaccount and moving old courses into that, but I think there are a lot of pitfalls for that idea depending how your Canvas account structure has been created (and it would have no affect on root admins, since a root admin will see everything).  We recently created an LMS Retention policy and scripts to delete old courses from Canvas to help some of the issues  you're facing.  We've been on Canvas for 10 years so we also have a lot of courses and data there.  We settled on a 7 year retention policy after much debate on the issue, so we initially deleted about 2.5 years worth of courses and now delete one term's worth at a time after that term is 7 years old.

If you'd rather not delete things entirely (only keeping things for 2.5 years might not be feasible, depending how often you offer courses, whether you want students to have access to past information, etc) you might want to consider changing your course naming scheme to make things easier to find.  Our course titles are in for format Term - Subject-Course-Section Title (ex: "Fall 2023 - HIST-101-001 Intro to history) and course code and in the format Subject-Course-Section (TermCode) (ex: "HIST-101-001 (202410)").  In most search places you can search using the title or code, and even the sis_id, so with our naming formats we can usually find what we need pretty easily even with 7 years of courses.

Hope this helps a bit!

-Chris

[RobertaBain]

Chris,

After reviewing all options, I think my best course of action is creating an "archive term"  throwing all the old courses into that term, then removing the old terms.  That way at least our terms will not be so convoluted, any idea how I can do a bulk move of courses into one term?  

[chriscas]

Hi Roberta,

If you're a full Canvas admin, you could download an SIS courses CSV report from your account -> settings -> reports area, make the changes in that file with excel or other sort of text editor, then upload that file back to Canvas in the account -> SIS Upload area.

Hope this helps!

-Chris

[ChrisMedina]

And of course yet another paid feature for something that should be part of canvas. we pay for a product that frees up their storage so they get to spend less on their storage allowing them more savings while making even more money on the archiving software. 

[RobertaBain]

Thank you for this information, not sure why Canvas makes it so difficult to manage old courses.  I don't think a naming convention change is something I can propose, I've only been in this role 2 months.  I am looking at creating an "archive term", then moving our old courses into there, then deleting the terms.  This may give us better control when we are associating/populating courses.  

I will keep testing, if I find a good solution, I will share here.  

[JasonSimmons]

Hello Roberta,

Sorry for the late response to this. To answer your question, yes, there is a way you can do exactly what you described. Instructure rolled out a new offering late last year that allows institutions to archive their course content and student data. You can now back up, access, and retrieve your content at any time. See the link below and I'm sure you're rep could help you as well. Good luck!

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

Best,
Jason