Shareability vs Data Collection 

Considerations for Non-Classroom Courses

Are you using Canvas for Conferences? Professional Development? As a Resource Hub? 

Canvas courses are being leveraged more and more frequently for innovative, non-classroom uses like Conferences, Digital Showcases, Professional Learning, and more. When developing these courses with the Kern County Superintendent of Schools, we learned quite a bit about the importance of more intentionally balancing the need for sharing and access with the need for collecting engagement data and analytics. KCSOS has already made this resource available to the California Canvas Collaborative, a network of Canvas users in California, which made us think-- the whole Community could probably benefit from this overview of course settings and design tips!

Enjoy and please leave a comment with your thoughts and best practices!

Have you ever wanted to do a live demonstration of New Analytics with a real course but couldn't because of student privacy issues? Fake students in a fake course don't generate realistic usage. New Analytics pulls information from the production instance so you cannot hop over to beta and change the names. Making a video and blurring out names doesn't have the same impact as presenting live. What can one do?

I've written a Firefox browser extension that anonymizes the user's name, email, sortable name, short name, and optionally removes the avatars so that you can give a live demonstration without worry about accidentally showing student information. The extension is loaded temporarily so that New Analytics reverts back to normal after restarting Firefox.