How do you handle social groups asking for Canvas Course Space?

[hallmans]

Our students have been extremely happy with the Canvas calendar. So happy in fact, that they would like Canvas sites for all 90+ clubs and social groups that they have created. Currently, we can only offer official courses with enrollment coming  automatically through the campus data manager.

How do other institutions handle this? Are there any policies that you have created around only allowing  SIS imports a for courses? Any experiences good or bad with managing this amount of groups would be interesting.

Thanks

-Steve

Steve Hallman

Manger, Academic Technologies

Kenan-Flagler Business School

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

[dgrobani]

We have two top-level subaccounts, Academic and Community. We put in Community the 50 or so non-catalog "courses" we've created on demand for faculty and departments (not students, so far).

Usually, we enroll the teacher(s) who request a community course into their course and leave them to manage the student enrollments. However, a number of our community courses are for sharing resources with all the students in a department, or even across the institution. I enroll students in these courses by running a weekly batch job that queries our SIS, creates an enrollments CSV file, and does an SIS import.

Cheers,

Daniel

[kona]

We don't have 90+ clubs and social groups wanting to use Canvas, but I'll admit that we have a good number of campus clubs and groups, as well as a number of other extra (not normal courses) courses that we've created for various purposes. In general our philosophy is the more the merrier. The more ingrained we make Canvas with the campus and the students then the more it gets used for classes and the more comfortable students are with Canvas. On our end we manage the enrollment of these courses, but if it got unmanageable then I'd probably start providing the "leader" of the course/group with enough admin access to add students to the course themselves.

Hope this helps and because there's no right or wrong answer, I've switched this from a question to a discussion.

[ejackson]

Also, we created a couple of new roles to use in the student groups - Officers, who have a few more rights to be able to post things to the group; Members, who basically have the same rights as students in a regular course; and Advisor, for the faculty advisor for the student group. This helps identify who has what role in the group.

[millerjm]

Hi hallmans​

For regular courses at our college, instructors cannot add students to their courses.

We use "courses" not "groups" in canvas for everything, since groups do not have all of the tools needed. 

We have a subaccount for "Student Life" that has all of the student clubs in it.  We have the faculty sponsor of the club request the site and be "teacher" to manage the enrollments with the right to add students.  In some cases, we have made the club officers also teachers to manage enrollments, etc. 

For department groups, we usually have the department chair request the site and manage the faculty.  Sometimes they will request that a few other department staff members have teacher rights to assist with the management of the site.

Hope that helps!

[buellj]

We also don't allow instructors to enroll students into courses or create courses other than a personal sandbox area for future course development. We also use courses for student groups, etc. calling them "non-course groups". The problem we have run into is when group admins go wild and add tons of people to multiple sites drowning out notifications, etc. from students official courses. Consequently are not supportive of large enrollment groups unless absolutely necessary.

[raquepan]

We are a K-12 district; so, all clubs have a staff member involved.  We allow all "teachers" to create courses (all of their courses and students are preloaded for them).  The teacher creates a course, gives it the club name and then the student self enroll using the code provided by the staff member. 

[Chris_Hofer]

For campus clubs and organizations, we typically do not set up course shells for these.  Have a look at this blog posting I wrote a while back over in the Higher Education​ group space here in the Canvas Community: Paper Pumpkin - Campus Clubs and Groups.

[jason_hill]

I like the idea of creating a Student Life sub-account to house these groups. We have a few of these groups on campus. Putting them in a single sub-account would allow us to send out alerts just to these types of courses if ever needed.

We do not enable Teachers to add people to their courses either. So, we created a new role called 'Teacher+' that has the permission to add students enabled. The faculty or club officers are assigned this role in the course, so he/she can add/remove students at will.

We are making an effort to restrict the use of these types of courses to only official clubs/groups. Many of our departments have shown interest in having a course shell to use as a document repository. We are encouraging them to use other options such as Box. The Box/Canvas integration is by far the best out of the major cloud storage services (Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and Dropbox). Once set up, Canvas users can just go into their Canvas profile and click on the Box link in the left-hand nav and navigate their Box folders that are shared with others in their department.

[kmeeusen]

Our section creation and enrollments are managed by an integration developed and managed by our State CTC System. Right or wrong, instead of creating sub-accounts we created undated terms to manage non-instructional classrooms (and some instructional if you count professional development). We do not let faculty create course shells nor manage enrollments. Like Kona, we will create a course shell for anyone who wants it. We started creating groups for clubs, but hated the limited functionality of a group, so went to full classroom shells For student clubs we ask for a signed requisition from the club adviser, just to keep things on the up-and-up. We manage all enrollments manually, although for some larger clubs, we use the cross-listing feature to copy enrollments into the class shells.

About the "undated terms" thingy. When we first started with Canvas we knew nothing, and did not completely understand how sub-accounts worked and the ramifications of creating them. So, we opted for creating a lot of terms to meet our needs. Now, after 4+ years, the terms list is becoming quite long, and we are re-investigating the use of sub-accounts for some purposes.