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A long, long time ago, in an office somewhere in my building (I'm guessing), a conversation probably nothing like this took place: "Okay, it's time to implement the new LMS, Canvas." "Hooray! Anything special we need to do?" "Well, we should probably decide if our Canvas instance should be one big bucket of stuff, or if we need sub-accounts for our 5 separately accredited colleges." "I'd think sub-accounts by college would be smart!" "Definitely. Oh... wait... We're integrating Banner with Canvas, right?" "Of course!" "Well, we have Banner set up to essentially treat our district as a single entity." "And?" "Well, there's no easy way to tell Canvas which sub-account the course should be in." "Oh. One giant bucket, it is!" Fast forward a year or two. The transition from Blackboard to Canvas is complete. Faculty adoption is growing rapidly. Online course offerings are expanding. Requests for adding account-level LTIs keep coming. Data and outcomes and analytics are hot topics. People begin to question with more regularity why we don't have sub-accounts to keep these things useful, streamlined, and logical. The answer continues to be "because we don't have Banner set up in a way that makes sub-accounts possible". Fast forward a few more years. People are asking at least weekly why we can't do a thing that can't be done because we don't have college sub-accounts. The requests finally prompt action. The action hits numerous brick walls. There is a script written that seems to solve the problem by moving the courses from the root account to the correct sub-account after the fact. Testing is going well. There is dancing and singing. Then someone performs a section sync in Test Banner, and the course in Test Canvas gets thrown out of its sub-account and back to the root account. Canvas insists that "account" should be sticky. Testing continues to prove that Banner is a jerk and refuses to listen to what Canvas says. Other avenues are considered and defeated. Tears are shed. And here we are, seven long years into our Canvas adventure, without any hierarchy whatsoever. And we've exhausted every reasonable idea, short of demolishing the entire Banner > Middleware > Canvas structure and starting from the ground up. So what's the point of my blog post / stream of consciousness rant / discussion prompt / cautionary tale / plea for help? Well, first, my words of advice: If you are new to Canvas, consider your account/sub-account structure, very very very carefully. Canvas is a wonderful company full of wonderful people, but they do not have expertise in your SIS of choice, so make sure your SIS of choice is ready and willing to work with you on establishing (and maintaining, and adjusting as needed) a good integration with Canvas. And my points of discussion: I know people have created a sub-account structure "after the fact". What makes our situation challenging is the way we set up Banner. We are unable to change how Banner is configured. We have had various vendors swear they can help us using APIs. This may be true, but they neither understand our Banner setup nor possess actual, practical, deep Canvas knowledge. We are still using Luminis Message Broker as our middleware. My understanding is that LMB is an outdated tool. But the alternatives (Ethos, ILP) are described to me as not mature enough, not robust enough, and/or possibly not compatible with our current portal (or version of). We haven't completely ruled out turning off real-time events and doing automated batches. BUT we have a bazillion (actual number) Banner users across our 5 colleges who would need to be re-educated on new processes and that is... daunting. The plea: Is there anyone out there that knows Banner really well AND knows Canvas really well AND is not already working full time for a Banner/Canvas institution? We have tried the "hire a consultant" route, and a creature with such expertise (in the land of hire-able consultants) appears to be rarer than a 3-legged unicorn. Has anyone had a similar situation and come up with a miracle workaround that they'd be willing to share? I will pay you in cookies and a coffee mug that says "You're Awesome!" [side note: don't search Amazon for "You're awesome" coffee mugs. Someone apparently decided not to stop there and made all the mugs NSFW] Please consider this an open discussion, and throw any ideas into the comments, no matter how wild and insane they might sound. Tag any groups or spaces I missed, or any smart folks who might know something, anything. It's possible there will be points for creativity, but it depends on whether I'm continuing to lose ground in the Community. I once made it to 17th. Those were the days. Thank you in advance, Canvas friends! Also tagging Canvas Developers‌ Instructional Designers‌ Higher Education‌ Higher Education SIS‌ ... View more

I had kind of a lot going on in 2018. But if I were to focus on the “Work Life” sub-account of 2018, and then the sub-sub-account of “Work Life - Good Stuff”, one of the highlights was the fact that 2018 was the first year my work team was stable for a whole, entire, calendar year. And therefore, it was the teamiest year yet. I mean, we teamed the heck out of stuff. We collaborated. We edited each other’s documentation. We cross-trained until we had backups of backups for all of the systems we administer. We shared allergy meds and Excedrin. We were truly team-tacular.   In all seriousness (for about 5 seconds), I spent years slowly building this team of fantastic people. They could frankly be kicking butt elsewhere for more money and fame and sports cars, or at least better office spaces, but for the time being, here they are. And, well, it was nice to have them in my 2018. There was a lot of change in our organization during the year, and a lot of weird new challenges. Being surrounded by people who work hard, innovate, and do it all with almost no direction made it much less of a crazy-pants year.   But speaking of crazy-pants, have I mentioned that my team is also hilarious and outrageous? They are my tribe. We make each other laugh. They accept that I have zero leadership skills but insist that I do. And sometimes we do strange things and call it team-building. We rarely have team meetings anymore, because such meetings tend to be redundant when collaboration is ongoing, but I’ve always insisted on having a team name. The names have ranged from “Team Defeated” to “Team Earth, Wind, Fire, and Kenneth”, but when my newest employee started, we quickly decided upon “Team Random Squirrel”. That was based on our propensity for getting off topic almost immediately, and usually in unexpected and untraceable directions. The name has stuck longer than any other team name, even while we continue to be random (but in a good way).   Most of the team finished the year with a flourish by road-tripping it from San Antonio to Austin for CanvasCon Texas. We left at 6:00 am. We got home at 8:00pm.  @kenneth_rogers  drove (and provided breakfast tacos).  @kschneider25  and Kenneth presented. I networked. d8c605a9d7f7d6dc4b3d5ace8500c81a9e3efe68574a4035a23a5100ee2011a5 absorbed Canvas knowledge like a sponge. We had the kind of good time you can only have when you are really sleep deprived. And we got our picture taken with the classy JW Marriott Christmas decorations because when the sleep-deprived boss insists, you’d better just roll with it. I think that probably summarized 2018 in a nutshell (Get it? Nuts? Squirrels?).   Here’s hoping that 2019 is a little calmer in the workplace and in life. And here’s to another year of Instructional Technology Randomness with my peeps.   [Random Squirrel logo courtesy  @kenneth_rogers ‌ / Team Christmas photo courtesy  @rseilham ‌ holding someone's cellphone] ... View more