Blackboard Organizations = Canvas ______ ?

[benjamin_rodrig]

Hi all,

I could't tell if this was asked here already, but please forgive any redundancy.  In Blackboard, we have a wide use of Organizations (Basically shells which are not associated with courses or enrollments in the SIS). These are used for study groups, video repositories, faculty groups, clubs, etc.

So the question is, what have you found to be the Canvas equivalent to these? Is it simply a matter of creating a course that's moderated by someone with a teacher role?

Thanks,

Ben

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi  @benjamin_rodrig ...

Check out my blog post here: Campus Clubs and Groups.  I'll also mention that's we've moved away from using account level groups as explained in my blog post and given these groups a regular course shell because it has more features than a group shell would have.  It also allows for self-enrollment...which takes the manual enrollment of people in these groups off of our hands...because now the group leaders can send out a URL invite.  Works pretty slick!

[benjamin_rodrig]

Thanks, Chris! This is exactly what I was looking for.

[Chris_Hofer]

Great to hear,  @benjamin_rodrig !  Feel free to post any questions to my blog post, and I'll be sure to reply.  Thanks!

[benjamin_rodrig]

Hi  @Chris_Hofer ,

I've had some more time to experiment with groups further. I't looks like even non-leaders in a (sub-account) group can add content. Sub-account groups seem to act like a place where any member can collaborate equally. Does that sound about right?

[Chris_Hofer]

I believe that is correct,  @benjamin_rodrig .  However, I am not 100% sure because we do not utilize sub-accounts in our Canvas instance at MPTC.  Maybe someone else who knows for sure will be able to chime in.

[benjamin_rodrig]

Thanks  @Chris_Hofer , I am liking the idea more and more of using manually created courses to take on that organization role as you mentioned earlier.

The librarians from our med school want students to have easy access to library resources from any med school course in Canvas.

I think we can...

• Manually create a "library course" that's visible to the institution.
• Place a self enroll link on that "library course's" home page to allow students to opt into receiving updates and utilizing conversations with the librarians.
• Then place a link to that "library course" in the appropriate med school courses to give the students easy access to it. 

Do you think that sounds workable?

Ben

[Chris_Hofer]

Yeah...that sounds like a workable solution to me!  You might want to test things out in a sample "sandbox" course, and then once you are able to confirm that everything is working the way you want...create the actual course shell that will be used with students in it.  Good luck!

[fred_bonatto]

Hi Benjamin, did you ever get around to testing/deploying manual courses to be used as resource centres?