Global Customer Success Newsletters

carolyn_lyons · ‎07-30-2021

pmillar · ‎06-22-2021

Blueprints are a powerful tool that can be used for pushing content from one course into one or more other courses. They give you the option of locking individual pieces of content in the blueprint course to restrict editing capability for that content in other courses. They are great for distributing template content and/or locked down content to lots of courses at once. They are also a great tool for teacher/instructor collaboration and content development.

thill1 · ‎06-16-2021

Each school year, the list of terms in Canvas will get longer. In some cases, particularly those where a school district is particularly large and/or terms are provisioned by a SIS (student information system), terms can become unwieldy, and it can be particularly difficult to identify and separate current terms from completed ones.

Consolidating terms accomplishes the following:

Moves (archives) concluded courses from across many terms (in which they were originally created) to one or a few ‘archive’ terms for permanent storage
Deletes concluded, no-longer-used terms, shortening the master term list

Here are some things you should know about consolidating terms before you start:

Term consolidation is not mandatory. If you have a small institution and your terms are manageable, or you simply want to leave terms and course term assignments as they are, you are free to do so. Term consolidation is for your convenience and does not have any technical effect on your Canvas instance.
Basic knowledge of spreadsheets and CSV exports are recommended. If you do not feel confident with those, please consult with your CSM for guidance if you wish to consolidate your terms.
Term consolidation can be done at any time. Typically, this is done between school years, after a school year has completed and before ‘rollover’ when new courses for the upcoming year are completed. However, consolidation of old terms and archiving of old courses can be done after the next year’s rollover. Also, you can consolidate terms with matching start and end dates as soon as they appear in Canvas if you so desire. (For example, you can put all of the courses for Semester 1 throughout your institution into a single term, rather than individual terms for each school.)

Considerations

Remember that terms serve two purposes: They grant access to students and teachers to courses by time, and they provide term-aligned reporting in Analytics. If you wish to obtain Canvas use reports by term (semester/year, and location), you will want to run these reports before you consolidate terms. After terms are consolidated, reporting for your deleted terms will be unavailable.

For example: If I consolidate all of my 2015-16 terms into one term, I will no longer be able to run reports like “Canvas High School- 2015-16 Fall Semester” However, I will be able to run reports on my new, archive terms, like “Canvas School District 2015-16 Archive” which will be useful institution-wide information.

It is also important to note that grades may change if you are using Grading Period Sets because those are tied to terms and the courses will no longer live in those terms. It is recommended that teachers export finals grades prior to consolidating terms if you'd like to secure the historical data.

Helpful Things to Understand About Terms

Terms have two purposes: Granting access to contained courses by time (start date and end date), and term-based Canvas usage reporting.
Terms and grading periods can be connected, but are not synonymous.
Terms can be created automatically (by your SIS / SIS file import)
Terms can be created manually through the Canvas UI or CSV import.
Terms are assigned term IDs in ever-increasing values upon term creation. This means that, by default, when you list terms by order according to term ID, oldest terms will appear at the top of the list, and terms will be progressively newer. This is helpful to know when managing / changing large blocks of terms in a list. Note: This general rule will not necessarily hold true when term IDs have been re-assigned manually.

Archive Term Setup

How many terms you use as archives, and how you divide them up, is entirely up to you. Here are some options you might consider:

Archive terms by year Example: “Canvas District 2015-16”	Create one single archive term for each academic year, and dump all courses into it.
Multiple yearly archive terms Examples: “Canvas District 2015-16 Semester 1”, “Canvas District 2015-16 Semester 2”	Create one archive term for each of the study blocks in your academic year.
Archive terms by school / building Examples: “Canvas High Archive” “Canvas Middle Archive” “Canvas Elementary Archive”	Create one single archive term for each of the buildings/schools in your district.
Combination	Create your own variation of the above choices

Step One: Create your archive terms

First, you will need to designate a term or terms, that will store your concluded courses. You can do this manually, through the UI. Choose names that effectively describe the courses that will be contained in them (time period, school building, etc.) You can easily change the name of this term later if you like.
When you have created your archive term(s), make a note of each archive term’s ID number. This is the SIS ID when viewing the list of terms in the Canvas UI, or the term_id when viewing a list of terms in the terms.csv provisioning report. (It is not the canvas_term_id in the provisioning report.)

Step Two: Run SIS export reports for terms and courses

On the account level in your Canvas instance, go into “Settings” and click on the “Reports” tab.
Scroll down and select the Provisioning Report. Then select configure and select courses.csv.
You should include deleted objects, to make certain that the terms you will be deleting are truly void of all courses before you attempt to delete them.
Click on “Run Report”

Step Three: Prepare and run courses.csv (note that you can try this in your test instance first if you prefer)

Sort your courses file by term_id. (This will typically leave courses attached to older terms at the top, and courses attached to newer terms at the bottom.)
Delete all courses from the spreadsheet that do not need to be moved:
- Already archived courses: Those assigned to already-created ‘archive terms’
- New courses: Those assigned to your newest terms for the current or upcoming year
- Manually-created courses you do not want to archive.
- Essentially, you are keeping only those courses you want to archive in the spreadsheet, and deleting everything else from the spreadsheet (except the header row). The courses you are archiving at this time should be listed together in one block, because they will have been created, with their terms, at the same time, and will have consecutive term-ID associations.
Replace the existing TERM_ID for any of the courses you want to archive with the new Archive Term SIS ID, which you designated when creating the archive term.
Delete the following columns: “canvas_course_id”, “canvas_account_id”, “canvas_term_id”, and “created_by_sis”
Save the courses.csv file (Saving a copy, if you want to keep track of changes)
Navigate to "SIS Import"
Choose your modified courses.csv file
Check “Override UI changes”
Check "Process as UI changes"
Click on process data.
Verify for errors after the file has been processed by looking under the Last Batch section of the page. If there are no errors, review your terms once again. Courses for the previous academic year will now be housed in the archive term that you created. You can then double-check the original terms that were created via SIS to ensure that all courses did in fact move to the archive term. If there are zero courses, delete the old terms as they will no longer be needed. You are now ready for your new school year!

Step Four: Prepare and run terms.csv (only necessary if you haven't been consistently deleting old terms from step 10 above)

Sort your terms file by term_id.
Delete all terms from the spreadsheet that do not need to be deleted in Canvas.
Change the ‘status’ column of the terms listed to ‘deleted.’
Import data by following the same process in steps 5-9 from above.

thill1 · ‎05-18-2021

eric_lee · ‎04-27-2021

TL;DR

The Canvas Community is the quickest and best way to find answers to Canvas questions.

Canvas Support is a great resource to reach out to if you are having an issue with Canvas or have any “how to” questions. In any case, check the Community first - this is usually the quickest way to find an answer without having to reach out to Support (Googling “Canvas” + “thing you’re trying to accomplish” works well, too).

Your Customer Success Manager (CSM) is great to talk to about strategic conversations - “why” and “what” questions (and to chat about new or upcoming Canvas features if it’s not clear how they might be used at your institution).

We have a handy table at the end of this article outlining when to use the Community or when to reach out to Support or your CSM.

Who

This article is aimed at Canvas Administrators - the people who are supporting the day to day running of Canvas at your institution.

Why

Often we find Canvas Admins wondering who they should be reaching out to when they have a question or issue with Canvas. By default, many clients will reach out to their CSM when they could probably be finding the answer even faster by searching the Canvas Community site or contacting our Support team. Sometimes clients contact the Support team when they should be reaching out to their CSM, but not as often. We want to make sure that you are heading in the right direction from the outset so that you can be in touch with the right people as soon as possible.

What

The Canvas Community is the ultimate destination for finding answers to your questions in relation to Canvas, Studio or other Instructure products. It’s the first place we go to as employees when we don’t know the answer to something and we usually find our answer in 30 seconds or less. This should be the number one place you go with any questions. It has our Guides (which are kept up to date with every release!), videos, blogs, articles, Q&A and lots of great groups and other resources available, literally at your fingertips.

The Canvas Support team is there to assist with issues you may be having with Canvas. Examples might include some sort of bug that is affecting something that you’re doing in Canvas or when some sort of error might pop up. Definitely get in touch with the Support team for these types of issues so that they can dive in and even get our engineers involved, if required. It should be noted that the L1 Support team actually solve 95% of cases that head their way. 95%!!! They are great at assisting our clients in getting things resolved quickly. Only 3% ever need to get escalated to L2/L3 and 2% to product/engineering.

You may not realise that they can also help you with “how to” queries as well. When we say “how to”, we don’t mean “how to create an entire course in Canvas” or “how to provision all our users from X Student Information System”. That would be a more strategic conversation with your CSM. If it’s something like, “how do I add an Admin to an account” or “how do I run a report to get a listing of all the courses in an account”, they could certainly help.

Keep in mind that you are likely to find the answers to those sorts of questions far quicker by searching in the Community than by getting in touch with Support. If you’re having trouble finding the answers in the Community, then that’s probably the right time to reach out to Support. It usually works pretty well, though. Check out these Community searches we did in the Community for those queries above:

Add an admin to an account

Report with all the courses in an account

If you are on Standard or 24x7 Support, you will need to make sure that the Service Cloud field admin assigned to your instance escalates the ticket to our Support team if you are wanting the Support team to know that you need their help. Otherwise, the ticket will sit there in the field admin’s queue, waiting for the Field Admin to do something with it. If you have Tier 1 Support, our Support team will triage all the tickets that come through from your instance.

So, what sort of things do you reach out to your CSM about? The strategic conversations about your rollout and adoption of Canvas are a good starting point. We’re very keen to help your rollout of Canvas be successful (the S in CSM). We also can point you to some handy resources to help with this. If you have any questions about other Instructure products outside of what you already have, we can also loop in the right people to have those discussions, if required.

CSMs can also help with things to do with the setup of your instance. Most of this is taken care of during the technical implementation phase of your Canvas journey, but sometimes new things become available that require us to switch them on for you (e.g. when New Quizzes first came out). There are also tools that aren’t added by default to Canvas that you might like to try out at some point. Examples of these are Instructure-built LTI tools such as the Microsoft 365 LTI tool, Chat, SCORM, etc. There are also a couple of third party tools that require some configuration on the “back-end” of your Canvas instance, like the Respondus Lockdown Browser plugin. We can help with this.

Remember that most third party LTI tools are easily configurable by you in the App Centre in your Canvas account or course settings. The most common configuration methods for tools that aren’t in the App Centre are via URL and LTI 2 Registration URL (e.g. Turnitin Canvas Plagiarism Framework). Just reach out to the vendor and they will give you the required URL, key and secret to set up their tool.

You may also be deciding whether to switch the way you are doing things in Canvas and want to chat about that. This could be changing from using Sections within single courses to using Blueprints, changing account structures or authentication methods for Canvas. You might be looking at adding parents as Observers in your Canvas instance. There are a few moving parts with that conversation that we’d like to chat to you about. Basically, if it’s something that needs contextual understanding of your institution, reach out to your CSM.

Lastly, Canvas is always changing. We have updates every month, with each Canvas release bringing new features and functionality. We’d love to chat to you if it’s not obvious how those new features might be best utilised for your context.

How

Unless an Admin has changed your Help menu structure, you should find a link to the Canvas Guides directly in the Help menu of Canvas (it’s right up the top). Otherwise, you can go directly to the Community at this address:

https://community.canvaslms.com/

As mentioned earlier, typing in “Canvas + what you are searching for” into Google can also be a quick and easy way to find what you’re looking for.

What is the best way to get in touch with Support? By clicking on “Report a Problem” inside of the Help menu of your Canvas instance.

This is the best way to initiate contact with the support team if you are having issues. All the metadata from the page you are on in Canvas is captured in the support case when you do this, which helps the support team diagnose what is going on and how to help you out. You’ll get an email with a case number when you do this. You can then quote that case number if you call up or jump on the Support Chat system.

Remember, if you are on Standard or 24x7 support, you will need to escalate the ticket to the Support team if you need their assistance. Otherwise it will just sit in the system waiting for you to escalate it! If you’re a little rusty on how to use Service Cloud as a Field Admin, we have a handy guide on the Community for that. If you have Tier 1 Support, the Level 1 Support people will triage your ticket. In any case, you can follow up with them immediately after you’ve created a new case if you need to as you’ll receive an email with a case number when you “Report a Problem”.

We should mention that you can also get in touch with the Support team by emailing support@instructure.com, but this is the least preferred method. Those emails go into a giant queue that can take some time to be responded to. It also means that all the metadata from the page you are on in Canvas is not sent through, which is why “Report a Problem” is the best method. If you do happen to lodge a ticket that way, it’s best to follow it up with a phone call or chat with the Support team in Service Cloud.

Support flowchart

When getting in touch with Support, if possible, include screenshots, URL’s, specific error messages, how it did work and how it’s changed, and magnitude of the issue.

Getting in touch with your CSM is fairly straightforward - you can get in touch with your CSM via email.

Additional Information

How do I use the new Field Admin Console?

How do I escalate a case to Canvas Support in the new Field Admin Console?

Canvas Guides

How do I get help with Canvas as an admin?

Quick reference - Community, Support or CSM

	Community	Canvas Support	Customer Success Manager
Questions & Topics	General Canvas questions “How to” guides Video guides Release notes Canvas groups Feature ideas	Canvas Authentication Issues (signing in) Canvas not functioning as it normally does Content Problems (submitting, saving, etc) SIS issues (incorrect course/enrollment data, etc) Troubleshooting LTI tools and Third Party Integrations from the EduAppCenter Canvas “how to” questions	Implementation, Adoption and Rollout/Expansion of Usage Instructure products & Services (Studio, Catalog, Portfolium, Learning Services, Admin Consulting) Canvas Resources Changing SIS providers/authentication Enabling Instructure LTI tools/some third party integrations General Questions
How to Contact	https://community.canvaslms.com/	Based upon Support Level: Standard Support: Report a Problem in Canvas Help Menu Field Admin Phone number - request from your CSM 24/7 Support: Report a Problem in Canvas Help Menu Field Admin has access to Phone number and Chat with support Tier 1 Support: Report a Problem in Canvas Help Menu Users have phone number and chat located in help menu as well.	Send an email to your designated CSM.
Tips	Use the search function on the Community site to find what you’re looking for.	If possible, include screenshots, URL’s, specific error messages, how it did work and how it’s changed and how it’s changed, and magnitude of the issue.	Try to articulate what you would like to touch base on with as much detail and info as you can.
Availability	24x7 🙂	Standard: 6 am - 6 pm (your timezone) 24/7 and Tier 1 Support: All day, every day	During business hours (dependent on where the CSM is located to reflect their timezone)

Global Customer Success Newsletters - Page 3

Newsletter - Global - July 2021

Blueprint Ins and Outs

Term Consolidation in Canvas - Yearly term maintenance to keep your term list manageable

Newsletter - Global - K12 - May 2021

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Global Customer Success Newsletters - Page 3