Sharing Canvas Paid (Pro) Account (individual teachers getting together to share an paid account)

[AnaLohrmann]

Hi all!

I just got off the phone with Madison, a Canvas K-12 representative. I would like to move to a paid account, however, it is way out of my budget as a solo teacher. I asked her if there is any "subletting" on Canvas. Meaning, someone who owns a paid account and then shares (for a fee), their account with other teachers. I would love to share with someone who already has a paid account. 

The issues I'm running into with the free account, is that my speeds are very laggy and loading videos for me and my students is very inconsistent. The rep told me that is because it is a free account with caps on file storage. 

Even if you're not the person with a paid account, willing to share, if you're a teacher with a free account that would like to pool funds together to share a paid account, please drop a line below!

The price for a paid account is $17,000 USD. It's a 3 year commitment. The first year is $7,000. The second two years are $5,000 each.

I would need many teachers to join, as my price point is up to $150 per year. Are there 46 more teachers out there willing to collaborate to make this affordable for us?

Excited to connect!

[SA-2021]

I am in the same boat and would definitely be interested!

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @AnaLohrmann ...

I don't have any feedback on your main question...but I am curious about this:

The issues I'm running into with the free account, is that my speeds are very laggy and loading videos for me and my students is very inconsistent. The rep told me that is because it is a free account with caps on file storage.

---

Even if you are still using the Free For Teachers (FFT) version of Canvas, I am curious as to how you are loading your videos into your course? Are you uploading your video files directly to your "Files" area of your course? If so, this wouldn't be the best option. Rather, you might want to consider either of these options:

• Use the upload media tool available in the RCE (Rich Content Editor) of your course. How do I upload and embed a media file from my com... - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)
• Upload your videos to your YouTube account. You could make the videos "unlisted" so that they aren't "public to the world". Only people with the link can view the videos. And, rather than providing a link to the videos, you can still harvest the embed code from your video and put that into any content page within your course...so students never have to go out to the YouTube website. They can watch the videos right within your course. This method keeps your "Files" area of your course open to storing other necessary files for your course and wouldn't use that space to store your videos. I found this article via a Google search from May 2022: What Does Unlisted Mean on Youtube? (A Must-Have Youtube User Guide) (hitpaw.com).

Do you think either of these options might be good options for you? Keep us posted here in the Community...thanks!

[SA-2021]

My best advice to you is to host as little as possible on Canvas.

When you host files natively on Canvas and go to copy a course, all the links on your pages will point back to your original course. The result is that only people enrolled in both courses will be able to see the files on the pages. Or you can go back and relink everything. However, if you host all your files elsewhere and only embed them in Canvas, then you copy courses with no issues or even navigate to a different LMS with relative ease.

After hearing that the price of Canvas Pro is pretty much out of my reach, I am now exploring how to migrate to Moodle 4.0. The cost of even the top tier Moodle 4.0 account is $1,600 per year while the cheapest one starts at $110. I don't like Moodle's format quite as much as Canvas's but I need to have admin controls and the free version of Canvas will not allow me to have any.

Finally, for videos Youtube will have superior hosting services for video than even Canvas pro accounts.

[chriscas]

Hi @SA-2021,

Just wanted to make a quick comment about files and linking... While I would not recommend uploading videos to the files area for a variety of reasons, secuiity and linking is not one of them. Canvas should automatically update page links to a "new" course if you do a complete course copy or import and did the linking properly through the RCE. The only time I've seen links not update is when doing a selective content import (importing a single page, for example) or if the links were created as external ones.

-Chris

[SA-2021]

I wish that had been my experience with the linking. However, if you browse the forms you can see that it has not been for myself or a lot of other people. I have duplicated whole courses, made sure to include the files and the relinking did not happen. It was only after a lot of wasted hours that I went to a system of not hosting ANYTHING on Canvas.

Now that I realized I will never be able to afford Canvas Pro, I am very glad I adopted this strategy.