Testing the student experience

[jenny_millea]

Hi all 

We will be shortly starting to undertake the migration from Moodle to Canvas. While Canvas has the test student function

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10058-415261153, this excludes many of the interactive features that you may want to test/review for student experience, (Attendance, conferences, conversations, collaborations, differentiated assignments, external apps, groups, peer reviews, and profiles do not work for the Test Student.  ) before making the site/feature available to students. 

I was wondering how other Canvas users do complex interactive testing without enroling dummy users, or what processes are in place to manage the creation/retiring of dummy users?

[kona]

We have "Danny Test" and a couple other "test" students we add to courses for development and testing purposes. I also have added some of our student workers (so real students) into my sandbox courses and used them to test things. And last, I've also used real student when trying things in the Canvas Test and Beta environment. 

We are a relatively small school so we don't have a real process in place (for creation and we don't delete) other than Admin's are the only ones who get to try things with real (test) students. 

[ejackson]

I feel sorry for "Danny Test" - - that poor kid is in so many courses! Heck of a course load! 😉

[kmeeusen]

LMAO!

Mine are all Disney characters, and I suspect they are all idiots - they enroll in everything, but have yet to complete a single course.Perhaps they are just well endowed professional students!

Agent K

[kona]

LOL...

[laurakgibbs]

One of my favorite things about Canvas compared to our previous LMS (D2L) was that every instructor can get a "student view" of their courses without having to enroll a dummy account. It's not a perfect simulation of the student experience (since it is course-based; we cannot see the dashboard as a student sees it, etc.), but still, it's a huge improvement. 

I don't know how that works in Moodle, but at least for us in migrating from D2L to Canvas, that "Student View" feature available to faculty was a huge plus! 

[tross]

We have created a few students that we use for testing and demonstration purposes.  We did it manually and don't automatically delete but they only have manual enrollments.  We also created observer accounts for those students so that we have a good way to demonstrate the parent functions.

[Chris_Hofer]

We have a few "dummy" roles that we created for our immediate team to use when testing things out (when using the "Test Student" won't suffice).

With respect to the external apps (LTIs) and "Test Student"...sometimes LTIs require an e-mail address to authenticate into the LTI app.  "Test Student" technically doesn't have an e-mail address associated with it.  That's why, for example, you can't use "Test Student" in the Turnitin LTI.

[Robbie_Grant]

 @jenny_millea ,

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and change this over to a discussion as there is not really a true "answer" for this question.  If you feel like it, please come back and explain how you tackled the Student Experience for the community.

Robbie