Organizing Our Development Shells

[IlariaHenein]

Hello Everyone,

 I’m the DE System Administrator Our District.

I’m reaching out to you regarding Canvas and development shells for professors.

I would like to know if your DE department does provide more than 1 development shell to professors.

If yes, how does the DE department manage the extra course shells?

Does your department have a practical way for managing that?

Also, is your college using any system or vendor for archiving your old courses online?

I really appreciate your help with this and look forward to learning from you.

[JasonSimmons · Accepted solution]

Hello @IlariaHenein—I can't answer all your questions, but I can tell you that Instructure recently rolled out a Canvas Archiving solution so institutions can back up and secure their LMS data, control user access, and reduce clutter in their Canvas LMS. The content can also be easily synced back to your Canvas LMS at the push of a button whenever you need it. Full disclosure: this is done in partnership with the company I work for, K16 Solutions. Below are a couple of case studies featuring Canvas LMS customers who are using this new solution:

Collin College archiving story

Seminole State College of Florida archiving story

Hope that helps!

Thanks,
Jason Simmons,
SVP, K16 Solutions

[JasonSimmons · Accepted solution]

Hello @IlariaHenein—I can't answer all your questions, but I can tell you that Instructure recently rolled out a Canvas Archiving solution so institutions can back up and secure their LMS data, control user access, and reduce clutter in their Canvas LMS. The content can also be easily synced back to your Canvas LMS at the push of a button whenever you need it. Full disclosure: this is done in partnership with the company I work for, K16 Solutions. Below are a couple of case studies featuring Canvas LMS customers who are using this new solution:

Collin College archiving story

Seminole State College of Florida archiving story

Hope that helps!

Thanks,
Jason Simmons,
SVP, K16 Solutions

[JessicaDeanSVC · Accepted solution]

Hi there @IlariaHenein! At my institution, we are happy to give instructors as many dev shells as they need, as many use one per course. We have a separate Term in our instance for dev shells, just like we do for academic courses. At this time, we do not do any sort of management around that or archiving. We have no storage restrictions right now with our Canvas contract, so we leave the courses alone unless asked by the instructor to remove some of their shells. 

We have learned that this creates a looooooong list of courses for some folks, so we customized our Canvas javascript to include a drop-down menu in the courses list to let folks sort their courses by term. This helps A LOT with the big list. 

[chriscas]

Hi @IlariaHenein,

In general, we try to limit faculty to one development shell (we call them WIPs, an acronym for work in progress) per course.  There are some cases where more than one course WIP is needed, like when a major redesign is going to take place, and we do allow that.  We generally do not allow the same faculty member to have 15 or 20 WIP shells for the same course though.  We only allow admins to create course shells, and we have a pretty small team so it's not hard to manage this ourselves.

Hope this helps a bit!

-Chris