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Hi All, Hope everyone's week is off to a great start!  I have been meaning to post something about this for a while in the community, but I wanted to share some of the issues we've been having with Instructure rolling out more granular permissions.  I know we were one of the louder voices pushing for this, and in my experience having a larger permission set allows for far better role customization (such as in Moodle, D2L, etc.). We're a large district, four colleges, 5-7k classes, 70-80k unique users per term, and we run Canvas from one instance with a huge number of subaccounts.  That said, we had setup the roles in such a way were the sub-admins from each college had the appropriate permissions from within  their college subaccount, and had permissions at the top level, etc. (such as the ability to act as).  What has been happening lately is that as permissions are rolled out, some of what our roles have been able to do now is not possible.  We've worked with Instructure and have multiple cases open, but often we'll get responses that we need to add permissions to the roles we aren't comfortable with. We have 27 different course/admin roles currently, and when for instance a subaccount admin no longer has permission to manage enrollment status in their courses due to a role they have at the account level in Canvas, that seems to be a usability issue.  The solution seems often to be adding additional permissions, but again we aren't comfortable with many of those, as the users have elevated permissions only for their college and other similar subaccounts (such as Dev, Clubs&Orgs, etc.). Mainly I am wanting to see if other higher ed users have been seeing this as well.  There are so many functions in Canvas not tied to a specific permission but are dependent upon a number of other permissions being enabled.  If you do have a large number of roles or multiple colleges with different admins at each sharing an instance I would be curious to hear how you have been managing. I do like that Instructure is listening to feedback and creating more granular permissions, it has just been  a bumpy road for us as we've already created so many roles based on what the permissions were initially. Thanks for your time reading this! Ken  ... View more

Hi All,   I thought I would post a blog to expand on the comment I made in the Ask Technology &amp; Engineering Leadership‌ blog started by  @Renee_Carney ‌.   @James ‌ was awesome (as usual) and linked to a three year old thread that had new comments by Instructure's Director of Products - Data and Analytics,  @kturco .  I never would have seen those posts in a three year old thread if not for James, so it's great to see someone in leadership comment on the issue.   Now having seen Kevin's posts in Canvas Data Requests count vs. Canvas Analytics Page Views‌, I would echo what many others have said and say that it's critical we are getting accurate mobile data reported to us.  I'll share one of his responses specifically to the question of "Are Mobile App page views included"?   Mobile page view data was added to the Course Analytics reporting last year. It has not, however, been added to the Access Report. This may be why you see mixed messages on whether or not it is included. While our plan is to  continue adding mobile data to our reports where appropriate, it is critical to understand the limitations of mobile page view data, and the reason for us to start with Course Analytics and not the Access Report.   Even more so than Canvas request data, mobile request data is best used in aggregate to identify trends of activity, and not for audit purposes or to get exact counts. Mobile page view data is inherently tricky to capture, since cell phones can lose service, apps can be force-quit, and  phones can lose power and be shutdown mid request. As such, mobile page view might be delayed from getting to our servers, or even dropped. This is true  for all mobile usage data, across all applications with mobile analytics data. It's a very tricky data set to work. This is why we focused on including mobile data first with our aggregate reporting (Course Analytics), as this data is valuable in showing overall activity trends.   With the growing use of mobile devices, we understand the need to include mobile data wherever page view data is included. This is something  we  will continue to work towards. I appreciate, and acknowledge this is not an ideal answer to address your immediate question, however transparency is something I take seriously, so want to make sure you have all the details.   We have Instructure's Amazon Redshift Hosted Canvas Data Services here at Los Rios (shoutout to Jason Rock jrock@instructure.com for being so great to work with), and mainly use Tableau for visualizations of that data.  The requests table aside it's great to work with, and running queries such as Device Usage gives us a good idea of how many students are using mobile devices (even if they aren't fully mobile-first).  We have tens of thousands of students using mobile devices for tens of millions of page hits every semester here (we had roughly 4.5M page hits per day on the request table last semester), so it seems that having equitable representation of that data should be a pressing concern, and needs to be more accessible than pulling from the requests table in Canvas Data (and that isn't even fully accurate).     As I mentioned in my post, there is an entire online college (our 115th Community College) launching in California this upcoming academic year that is being designed as mobile-first: Online Community College - California.  These students need have their work counted as equitably as students using a PC, and the reports and analytics should not be any different from students using a PC.  This would help our students as well, as there are so many courses being designed to be mobile-first, and that was a huge topic of conversation at the Online Teaching Conference 2019‌ I just attended last week.  I'm very grateful to Kevin for posting and keeping the discussion going, as it is certainly a concern for those of us in charge of pulling those numbers.   Oh....and I won't even get into folks like me that use Photon on their iOS devices in order to use a User Agent and spoof everyone so they think I'm on a PC using Chrome or Firefox rather than an iPhone or iPad, since we know those folks are just trying to use something that plays Flash on iOS ( <--- this was my poor attempt at humor for those nice enough to read to the bottom).    Thanks for taking the time to read this.   Ken ... View more

Hi Everyone, I'm usually not one to write too many blog posts, and I really debated the best place to put this.  As Ally is an accessibility tool it could have certainly gone in the accessibility group (and beginning my community college career in DSPS I do have a soft spot for UDL and 508/ADA compliance--so important for student success), but this has more to due with implementation and challenges regarding our processes and complexity of getting a tool of this scope in-place at a multi-college district with over 50k FTES.  I do believe this is more applicable to this Higher Education group, as there are specific challenges that we face in our environment that may not be as applicable to some of the other sectors.  Also, please forgive me as I've left some of this intentionally vague so that I don't identify any specific folks at our district, as everyone is wonderful to work with here. To begin, we had a subgroup that I was part of that was charged with analyzing which potential tools we could adopt in order to enhance accessibility for students, and after looking at a few options it was determined that our best path forward was to explore Blackboard Ally.  We piloted Ally for a semester, and after positive feedback from the small testing group we then signed a 3 year contract.  The thinking was that after using the tool in a somewhat limited capacity with that small group it was found to be valuable, and we could then begin an opt-in rollout to specific courses where faculty could use the tool the first semester (where we could provide additional training and use those experiences to develop additional resources), then roll it out to all courses the following semester. The main complexity started when we began to look as a District at how the content that Blackboard Ally identified as needing some level of remediation, was in actuality going to be remediated.  Looking at the sheer amount of content that we need to remediate, it is a daunting task.  As I mentioned above, we're a pretty large district, with four colleges and over 50k full-time equivalent students.  Looking back at just one semester of content that Ally identifies, we can see almost 800,000 pieces of content.  While the course numbers are a bit inflated as we create a course shell for every section, the content number is fully accurate regarding what's in Canvas.   This leads me into the challenge that we are still facing, and why we have had to delay our rollout--simply that we need a comprehensive plan on how this content is going to be remediated.  Right now we have courses that have content in them that is not fully accessible, and we can see that in the account level reporting.  We are not looking at or evaluating the course specific accessibility reports, though they are available.  The challenges is that content was there before we implemented Ally, as it is there now with Ally implemented, the only difference is that we can't preach ignorance or pass the buck when we have reporting that shows we do have inaccessible content. We are now having to somewhat on-the-fly come up with plans on how to help faculty remediate content.  Many of the courses we have are fully online (and fully developed) and have been taught and continually have evolved for years.  When there are hundreds of pieces of content, each of which can take between minutes and hours to remediate, there is just too large of a burden to expect faculty members to fully remediate the content themselves in a timely manner.  We are evaluating options such as hiring more faculty coordinators at each campus to help with remediation, hiring district-wide instructional designers to remediate content, having stipends available to faculty for content remediation above their regular teaching load, etc.  With four colleges and so many decision makers needing to be consulted and the ultimate decision needing to be negotiated with faculty, this process is not something that is able to be accomplished in a week or even a month.  It is critical we get this done for students, as they need fully accessible content, but there are so many considerations that need to be made it is quite the process. In closing, the main reason for making this post was to inform others regarding the challenges that are presented once you begin identifying inaccessible content.  Hopefully you have a good experience using whatever tool or solution that your institution chooses, and I just want to make sure that those charged with making those decisions consider the implications when they choose to implement their solution.  Having a comprehensive plan regarding how to remediate content is very valuable. Thanks for your time reading this. Ken ... View more