Subaccount Strategies

[bmerkel]

An effective subaccount hierarchy can go a long way toward making an admin's life, and their users' lives, much easier. We will cover a wide range of things to consider when planning your institution's structure. Examples will touch on SIS integration, the Canvas API, and delegated administration.

Presenter: Brian Merkel​ - Maryville University

  Location Map & Room: WHITE PINE

  Login to "Add a comment" below!

               

[bmerkel]

Thank you all for coming..  what an awesome turn out. It was great to meet so many people sharing the same challenges. Here are a couple of things I promised those I talked to afterward.

The link to last year's presentation - Brian Merkel - The Admin's Utility Belt InstructureCon 2014 - YouTube

Always happy to help if I can, just let me know.

[jmunoz1]

Thanks for sharing!

[Sylvia_Ami]

Thanks so much  @bmerkel ​ 

I was at your session and I'm so glad I went.  We are just starting with Canvas and are currently figuring out how we want to organize the sub-accounts (and sub-sub-accounts....). Your org chart showing how you've set up your own instance was very helpful.  Thank you for going into such great detail on the SIS Course ID.  The way you illustrated the structure and logic on your slides made it so easy to understand.

But most of all, thank you for sharing your expertise.  Wow, going through two migrations to Canvas in two years!  I'm sure you really know your stuff.

Thanks again.
Sylvia

[biray]

This session video is now available at: ​

[curryer]

Hi Brian,

Thank you so much for your session at InstructureCon! We've been trying to figure out how to tackle sub-accounts for our online courses, and I was wondering if you had any suggestions.  The way our university is setup, the hierarchy is more: Academic --> College --> Department --> Subject --> course ID (on campus) or Online (Ecampus) -->course ID. (Here's an image: Account Hierarchy​) Courses are not subaccounts. Our issue is, if we split the academic to be on campus vs. online, we'll have courses that need to be in both sections, as we understand it. Take online CH 121 for example. We'd like it to be in the online subaccount, so that our team can access it as admins, but we'd also like to have it within the college of Chemistry so that the Chem admins can access it. Can courses go into the structure twice or do you have a different idea for how to set this up?

Thank you,

Erica

[bmerkel]

Erica,

Based on your diagram, my first question is... Is there a particular reason that Ecampus is so low on the hierarchy. Assuming that Ecampus is very similar to our online instructional method, I would have put that up at the zone (top) level. I'm not sure what your other top level entities are besides Academic but that's where we made the differentiation based on delivery type. So for you it would go Ecampus > College > Dept > Subject > Course ID. That way your team would have access to all Ecampus courses across all colleges/dept/subjects. Then the Chem admins could have access to the Chem and so on.

Are you implementing the structure from scratch or are you trying to revise a structure you already have in place?

[fosterl]

Brian, I am the LMS admin at OSU. Our subaccount hierarchy was chosen partly because all of our Ecampus courses are within their departments. That is, an Ecampus Chemistry course is first, in the Chemistry department. The Ecampus chemistry courses are a subset of all Chemistry. Erica was hoping there is some mechanism by which a course can be in a second subaccount so that all Ecampus can be in one subaccount. It is my understanding that this is not doable at this time, but please correct me if I'm wrong, or if you have strategies for getting around this.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Hi  @fosterl ‌ - did you ever figure out how to deal with courses needing to be organized into two subaccounts for different reasons? We too would like to have courses in Chemistry also be in Ecampus. ie be able to make settings for all Chemistry courses sometimes, and all Ecampus courses sometimes.  As you say this isn't possible.

Ecampus  (Acct)

   Chemistry  (subaccount)

   Business  (subaccount)

   All departments  (subaccount)

Oncampus (Acct)

   Chemistry  (subaccount)

   Business  (subaccount)

   All departments  (subaccount)

as well as

Chemistry (account)

     Ecampus  (subaccount)

     Oncampus  (subaccount)

 Business  (Acct)

    Ecampus  (subaccount)

    Oncampus (subaccount)

All departments

Or, are these types of accounts what we need?  And if so, how do we select just Chemistry or just ecampus to assign settings? And how we will put the courses into the correct subaccount via SIS?

Ecampus_Chemistry (account)

Oncampus_Chemistry  (account)

Ecampus_Business  (account)

Oncampus_Business  (account)

Nancy

[fosterl]

We never found a solution. We just have to deal with the 150+ Ecampus subaccounts which live under the Department accounts. Sorry I don't have better news for you!