Anyone tried a mega course site and had issues?

[kbink]

Hi Community,

I've got a course that we are proposing a complex course site setup we are calling the mega course.  The reason this is a solution is not important.  Want I want to know if this setup is even a viable solution that will work.   Will canvas bog down due to the amount of content?  The number of students?  The number of assignments?

The Mega Course Setup

• 5 lecture sections, 35 lab sections, all cross-listed into one Canvas course site
• Nearly 900 students
• Each lecture has its own content and assignments.
  • Assignments assigned to only their lecture section
  • Modules created that are visible to only their lecture section.  So there are 5 sets of 16 modules (1 per week), one after the other, for each lecture section
  • Students and TAs set to only see their lecture section to keep them from modifying grades in other sections
• All lab sections have the same content which would be the last collection of 16 modules.  We usually create a redirect link to get right to the lab materials.
• Total assignments = 30 lab assignments +5 * 60 for all the lectures = about 350 assignments in the gradebook.
• I expect we would need to have the storage size limit for the course increased.

So to repeat the questions:

• Will Canvas bog down due to the amount of content? 
• Will Canvas bog down due to the number of students?
• Will Canvas bog down due to the number of assignments?
• Will instructors be limited to seeing only the content for their lecture if they are enrolled as instructor only in their section and modules are visible only to that section or will they see and be able to modify the module content from all the sections?

You can see our main concern is the size of the course is so big that it takes so long to load that students can't get to the content or instructors and TAs can get things to load so they can get through grading and see the overall gradebook.

[valentinesking · Accepted solution]

Howdy @kbink 

Great question. Your solution is possible. Just because it is possible, doesn't mean you should do it.

We have large enrollment courses like you are suggesting - especially with the lecture and recitation/lab sections. However, as a best practice we often use blueprint courses - especially in situations where you only want instructors to have access to only their section/content [usually all lecture sections are one site; and recitation/labs use the blueprint, associating out to all the recitation/lab sites. 

Technology is what it is and why tempt fate? I'm not alluding that there will be problems, but anything is possible, Murphy's Law and all that. Also, if I was an instructor I wouldn't 350 assignments in my gradebook (even with filtering & sorting). From a support level, trying to find the right assignment (if there was an issue or a professor wanted you to check settings/accommodations) in 350 would be stressful.

Val King, the ID
Sr. ID Project Leader at The Wharton School at UPenn

[nuscitpkg]

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@valentinesking wrote:

We have large enrollment courses like you are suggesting - especially with the lecture and recitation/lab sections. However, as a best practice we often use blueprint courses - especially in situations where you only want instructors to have access to only their section/content [usually all lecture sections are one site; and recitation/labs use the blueprint, associating out to all the recitation/lab sites. 

Unrelated to the original question: how do the blueprint courses work in this scenario? Do the instructors of the respective sections create the course(s) or are they provisioned by the university.

Context: We provision the courses for all official courses i.e. each course has one Course in Canvas. Instructors are not allowed to create their own Courses.

[dbrace]

Hi @kbink,

I agree with @valentinesking response.

Everything that you have presented is possible but there will probably be some confusion and some performance issues.

While not used for grading purposes and not divided up into different sections and different instructors, my institution (a community college with rolling admissions and course/section lengths throughout the year that vary between 14 weeks, 10 weeks, 7 weeks, and 5 weeks) has a yearly "Student Life" course and we enroll all students (we never remove anyone) during a nightly feed that have more than 0 registered credit hours. We use it for sharing general information about campus life and activities and it currently has over 10,600 students in it.

As I said, there is nothing graded in it, the "Grades" area does take longer to populate and so does the "People" area but what you have described is possible but I would do extensive testing because of the permissions side of it.

-Doug

[PatriciaRoy]

I can't answer all of your questions, but I know that if you are using cross-listing to combine the lecture sections, instructors are not limited to seeing only the content of their lecture because all the content is loaded into a parent course with all of the children sections pointing to it. Here is the Admin Guide on the subject: How do I use cross-listing in an account? 

In addition, Canvas doesn't let you create sub-sections, which I think is what you are suggesting.

Someone else here suggested using a blueprint, which I would like to hear more about. We have some courses with many sections and quality control can be a nightmare.

What we do for the situation in the OP is include a program or course manager role for a senior faculty member who is responsible for the initial course build and who oversees it to make sure nothing goes sideways -- usually they are also an instructor for the parent section. The instructors are associated with just their own section, but the content is shared and centrally managed in the parent course. Instructors can apply a filter in the gradebook, but if they don't, they will see all the grades. Students may or may not be restricted to interacting with their own sections. We have this system in place for Anatomy & Physiology with lab, 11 instructors, 271 students total, about 7 sections. Not nearly as large as yours, but this works.

[kbink]

So here is the background I didn't give initially.  Every course and section has its own course site.  Currently in registration, lab sections are tied to specific lecture sections.  That is where our problem lies.  To better use lab space, we'd like to uncouple the lab from the lecture, and for this year that would be without creating a separate lab course.  The idea would be students could choose any lab section, regardless of their lecture section. Each lab section could students from each of the 5 lecture sections, so we are proposing options that would allows us to provide content to students, collect and grade assignments from students, and collect attendance during lab.

So currently we use blueprint, having one lab blueprint that is copied into each of the unique lecture sites.  We crosslist the lab sections into a specific lecture as they are tied that way in registration.  TAs grade in the lecture sites for their lab sections as everyone in the lab section is in that lecture section.  Students struggle getting a lab and lecture time that works for them.  Some lab sections are unenrolled because students can't attend the lecture associated with that lab section.

If we uncouple lab from lecture, having separate lecture sites with the blueprint copied in will be problematic.  The lab course site would need to be separate from the lecture sites, as it is only possible to cross-list a lab section into a single lecture site and there could be students from all the lectures in a single lab section. So all the lab sections would be together in a single site. Students would not have accurate in progress grades, and the instrutors would need to manually calculate grades at midterm and finals to get students grades for reporting.

We know the best solution is to have a lab course and a lecture course separate from each other, but that has to go through the process here so it will take some time.  

If you have an alternative solution for the meantime that might fix our issue, please, let me know!

Kalli

[PatriciaRoy]

I wish I had a great idea for you. In our Nursing courses, the lectures and labs are all cross-listed according to type -- the lectures are all merged and the labs are all merged separately. This makes it easier for the lead instructors to enact quality control. In some cases when there are many sections, the merged sections are grouped by meeting times -- so one merged group will be all the lectures or labs that meet M-W, while another is all the T-T courses. This approach relies on the content managers/lead instructors to reach out to us to merge the sections and copy over past course material, which they then edit. I don't know if this is efficient enough for your instance, but it seems to work for us so far. Our course sizes are only going to get larger, so I'll be interested to hear what you and others experience. Good luck!

[kbink]

So I will let you know the blueprint works great but you need to put in some controls and checks.  In our lab blueprint, every module, file, assignment, rubric, assignment group has the word lab in it.  We lock the parts of the blueprint to prevent content and date changes.  We set the due date for assignments and pages as the sunday before the week of labs and have instructions on every one that says we do this to ensure they see the content in time, but it is always due the by the start of lab for them.  TAs manually check to see if things were submitted after the start of the section and adjust grades as needed.  This avoids us having to create due dates in 35 different sections for about 32 different assignments. There is confusion the first week or two that needs to be addressed by TAs, but it works.

Also I often meet with the lecture instructors to copy forward their courses to new semester to ensure that they select content and leave behind all the materials with the name Lab.  If I don't and they copy everything, there will be two copies of all the lab materials in the course - one affiliated with the current blueprint and the other not.  Our instructors do not have the power to associated new courses with the blueprint.  So at the end of term I break the association (materials remain and sync no longer works) and then when they are ready I sync them with the new course sites. We use the attendance function, and that can't be done through blueprint so we often ensure that is set up correctly in the lecture sites as well, as it is part of the lab grade and lecturers tend to ignore it.

Oh and the blueprint course needs to be in the same subaccount as the child courses.