How do I access test environment as a student?

[rhargis]

Hi all,

We're new to Canvas (this is our pilot semester right now, and this is my first question to the community, so we're really, really new).  So far, things are going along relatively smoothly, but as with any transition, some things are a bit perplexing. 

Today's bewilderment is deeply troubling, though.  In short, I can't replicate the experience of the vast majority of our users (students) in the test environment, and I'm scratching my head to figure out why.

We want to ensure that our end users don't encounter any unexpected issues when an update is applied to the production environment.   If they are going to see something new, different, or strange, we want to know about it beforehand and be prepared to respond.  To that end, prior to an update's release, we go into our test environment and perform full testing on the updated components using all available account and course roles.  This way, we know, for example, that Component X will cause students running Browser Y on Operating System Z to receive an error, and are prepared to advise students of possible solutions.

Well.... that was our practice...  

But the Canvas environment is not configured to allow this. 

Are we just expected to trust that everything will be okay or is there some special thing we need to do to enable this option?

Please tell me that there's a way to do this and that I'm being dense and haven't just not figured it out yet.

Thanks,

Rodney Hargis
Princeton University

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hello  @rhargis  Welcome to the Canvas Community!  Glad to have you here...and hope you come back frequently!

I think it's awesome (and great practice, too) that you want to make sure that things work in your "test" environment for your students before things go "live" in your "production" environment  With respect to your question, take a look at the first bulleted item in the blue box at the top of this Guide: How do I access the Canvas test environment as an instructor? ... which specifically addresses the role of a student in the "test" environment.  This is by design...and my guess is because you normally wouldn't want students logging into any other environment other than your school's main Canvas "production" environment.

I hope this helps to answer your question, but please let Community members know if you have any other questions about this...thanks!

[Stef_retired]

 @rhargis  Welcome to the Canvas Community, and it's great to hear that things are going smoothly so far. Further to Chris's comprehensive reply (thanks, Chris!), here's the documentation on the test environment for Canvas admins: How do I access the Canvas test environment as an admin? The reason I have included that additional link is to call attention to this extra note:

All users can access the Canvas test environment, but students cannot access course content beyond the Dashboard; if you are an admin and want to allow students to view all course content, please contact your Customer Success Manager.

So if you would find it helpful during the vetting process to have students accessing content beyond the Dashboard in the test environment, please contact your CSM to ask about having this additional capability enabled.

Good luck!