Using Canvas for Student Affairs

[HaleyKinder]

Hello, has anyone used Canvas for things other than academics and learning? Our Student Affairs and Engagement department are wanting to replace some of the processes/tools they have now. For example, our students use the Ready Education app to track event attendance, post buy/sell of books and other class materials, send notifications, etc.. They have asked if Canvas is a possibility for their needs, but I can't seem to come up with a way to accomplish what they do with the Ready Education app to what Canvas can offer. has anyone else done something like this? Those familiar with the Ready Education app see any way those elements can be replicated/simplified with Canvas? Thank you in advance!

[John__Lane]

We are going to use it for rank and tenure review and committee work.  

[jenn_stevens]

@John__Lane, I'm super interested in hearing more about how you use it!

For rank and tenure review, most of our process happens outside of Canvas, but we do get requests to add tenure committee members to old classes so they can judge teaching. The trouble is that multiplies very quickly, and if you're on the tenure committee all of a sudden your class list is cluttered with so many courses that it can make finding yours difficult (as well as being manual work for our staff to add/remove). We've tried suggesting that faculty pick only one course to show, make a template course that is a "best of", or that we'll help faculty make a screencast of past classes that talks about their greatest hits, but we haven't had many takers for any of those options.

For committee work, I actually just said Canvas wasn't a good idea for our institution to use as the Faculty Assembly repository for all committees, for a few reasons:

• no search
• limited space
• someone has to be in charge of adding/dropping people
• notification fatigue
• potential for there to be too many teachers in one course and accidental deletions happening
• if teachers are students in one class, they end up getting the canvas-wide announcements targeted towards students (although to be honest that ship has long since sailed at our institution)

I could definitely see it working if one course was a single committee, with the chair in charge of adding/dropping! In our case the push was for more transparency, and they didn't want info locked away like that. We ended up with Google Drive.

I'm very interested to hear how it's working at other schools, to see if there are ways we could be doing it that I haven't thought of.

[jenn_stevens]

Hi @HaleyKinder ,

I don't know Ready Education specifically, but it seems to function almost like a campus app or portal? Canvas is not built for that - you could try to force it into being that, but I think it would be more trouble than it's worth and would take a LOT of custom scripts.

Canvas shines when courses have a beginning and end date and with enrollments flowing from the student information system. We have, over the years, used it for things like a required class for first years, with each section representing a particular dorm - but that was a ton of manual work to manage. I think something like assigning people to classes based on identity (first year, alumni) instead of enrollments would need manual uploads and attention to off boarding - or someone to write a custom script.

[JaredWall]

Most departments on our campus have a presence in our LMS (currently Moodle). We are transitioning to Canvas. I have set sub accounts for all non-academic departments. Student affairs already utilized the LMS for things like Anti-Hazing training and records. Currently, a safe campus course is being built to provide all campus resources for students in one place in the LMS. Since Canvas allows for announcements to specific roles, all students could be targeted for communication via the LMS.

We also use our LMS for tenure and promotion among other things. This will continue with Canvas.