Limit editability of course after term end

[rwollner]

We would like concluded courses to be preserved as an archive. I thought that courses automatically enter a "read only" state to faculty and students after the conclusion of a term. However, I have found out that faculty are able to delete material from a course after its conclusion.

Is there a way to prevent any changes from happening within a concluded course but still leave the course available to students to view and faculty to view and copy?

Thanks!

[chriscas]

Hi @rwollner,

I have a couple questions around this for you.  First, have you verified the courses and/or sections are not overriding term dates?  If you've made sure the term date is totally in effect, you may want to verify you have term dates as well as dates for teachers that either coincide or are close to each other (the teacher access dates would override the term, so if you set teacher access for a year after the term, they could make changes for that period).

When things are set up right for this, you can definitely have the scenario you want.  I can confirm that because it's exactly what we've had with our courses for years.

Look forward to hearing back from you!

-Chris

[rwollner]

Thank you, Chris! Our Term setting is set to end Teacher access at term end. The course participation setting is set to Term.

Where things get interesting is the Sections page of Course Settings. On that page, the Section dates have appropriate start and end dates. However, at the top, there are course and term dates listed. The term dates are correct, but the course start and end dates both say "no date." Could that be our problem? I am not sure how to adjust that. We create courses using import files from our SIS, so I assume those dates are set by that.

It is reassuring to hear that it is supposed to function how I thought it functions. I did not verify that the faculty member deleted files from her course; I took it on her word. I will verify that she did, because I think there's a chance she thought she deleted files and in fact only deleted them from her file storage.

Thank you!

[chriscas]

Hi @rwollner,

Could you possible post a screenshot of the dates you see in the sections area?  I'm curious about that because on the sections tab, I don't see anywhere where course or term dates would be displayed.  We generally do not populate section dates either (unless we are manually createing a section to extend the course for a student who got an incomplete), just the term.  It could very well be that the faculty was incorrect about being able to delete too.  You should be able to act as one of your faculty members in Canvas and go to one of the courses to verify they can't do much.  The caveat to all of this would be 3rd party tool integrations, as Canvas date restrictions wouldn't generally apply to them.  If your courses use a lot of integrations, maybe inside of those tools is where some editing is still available.

-Chris

[rwollner]

My preference would definitely be to not include section dates. It seems like our SIS integration requires it.

That is a great idea to act as a faculty member to test it. I will do that.

Thank you for your help!

[rwollner]

Acting as the user, faculty do not seem able to edit or delete material. So it is functioning as expected. I assume she deleted from her files and thought she was deleting from the course, but I will have to have her show me what she did to confirm. Thanks for your help!