How would I archive all courses belonging to Terms of a certain age?

[molshausen]

I am wondering whether there is a way to archive all courses that are, for example, five years or older based on which Term they fall under. Effectively, I'd want to hide them from both instructors and students, but be able to restore individual courses for instructors upon request.

[BrianLester · Accepted solution]

Given that you want to be able to hide courses from instructors and students I would move the courses in question to a different account which non account Admins don't have access to. For instance at my school all our recent courses are in an account called Academics. I can move courses to a special Archive account (with subaccounts for departments corresponding to the subaccounts for the active and recent courses (say 'English' in the Academics account and english Archive in the Archive account). Teachers have no access to the archive account, but I let them know before archiving so a course can remain in the Academics account if needed; courses are also easy to move back to Academics if needed by changing the account from in the course settings.

One issue is that the terms still appear in the courses menu (but courses won't be visible to teachers), otherwise this works well. I use the API to bulk move courses between accounts

[julian_ebeli]

Hi there,

What do you mean by archive? Do you want to hide the courses? Or stop them being used? Or delete them entirely?

You can conclude all the courses in a particular term just by setting an end date on the term itself.

Cheers

Julian

[molshausen]

Hello Julian,

I guess what I'm envisioning would involve hiding courses from both instructors and students, but not deleting them.

One motivation for exploring this idea is to reduce the cognitive load for veteran instructors who have a large number of past courses to sift through. We do already conclude courses by term end date as you describe.

Thanks,

Mattias

[BrianLester · Accepted solution]

Given that you want to be able to hide courses from instructors and students I would move the courses in question to a different account which non account Admins don't have access to. For instance at my school all our recent courses are in an account called Academics. I can move courses to a special Archive account (with subaccounts for departments corresponding to the subaccounts for the active and recent courses (say 'English' in the Academics account and english Archive in the Archive account). Teachers have no access to the archive account, but I let them know before archiving so a course can remain in the Academics account if needed; courses are also easy to move back to Academics if needed by changing the account from in the course settings.

One issue is that the terms still appear in the courses menu (but courses won't be visible to teachers), otherwise this works well. I use the API to bulk move courses between accounts

[dbrace · Accepted solution]

Continuing on with what @BrianLester mentioned, you can generate a provisioning report to get a list of courses in a term or (sub)account. From that report, you can either use the API (probably by making a script) or create a courses CSV file to move the courses to a different (sub)account.

-Doug

[molshausen]

Thanks for those suggestions, that scheme makes sense to me.

[JasonSimmons]

Hello @molshausen - good question. Last year, Instructure rolled out a new offering for all Canvas LMS customers called Canvas Archiving powered by K16 Solutions. Canvas Archiving allows institutions to back up their data, control user access, and maintain a cleaner version of their Canvas instance. You can push individual, archived course content to the LMS and retrieve student data and submissions as needed.  And of course it can be done by term too. 

Many Canvas customers are already using this solution. Below are a couple of recent case studies and an attached infographic on this offering.

• Seminole State College of Florida adopts Canvas Archiving
• Collin College adopts Canvas Archiving (Inside Higher Ed)

I hope that helps.

Best,
Jason Simmons, SVP, K16 Solutions