Is anyone using Sandboxes?

[joseph_allen]

Is anyone using "Sandboxes" with their teachers?  If so, I'm interested in knowing how you create and manage them?  Do you populate them with templates or sample content?  Can teachers have more than one? How do you delete them?   Thanks!

[Robbie_Grant]

 @joseph_allen ,

We create blank development courses based on a request from an instructor.  Most of the requests come during our Introduction to Canvas, 2-hour workshop that we do for instructors that are new to Canvas.  We recommend that instructors have a development course for each academic course they teach.  We remove the academic courses 2 years and 1 week after the course has ended.  We only delete the development courses upon request from the instructor.

Robbie

[kbickell]

We also create sandbox courses upon request. Typically they are blank courses, but depending on what the faculty need sometimes we populate them with our online course template, other times we populate with a regular Canvas course content (assuming that either the instructor taught the imported course in the past or has permission from the previous instructor). 

In some cases we do create more than one, again depending on the needs of the instructor, but this is rare.

Unless they create/import a lot of files or content, we don't usually bother with deleting them.

[laurakgibbs]

I don't know how Canvas administrative set-ups work, but I LOVE MAKING MY OWN COURSES. In our Canvas set-up at University of Oklahoma, we are able to create courses on the fly whenever we want: not just as sandboxes, but for anything we want to do (and we can delete them when we are done if it really is just a sandbox experiment).

Moreover, as I learned from a student last semester, even students can create courses, so one of my students created a course that they used as a group collaboration space for their Capstone project. I thought that was genius!

Public, self-created courses are, in my opinion, a huge untapped potential in the Canvas ecosystem. When we had D2L, we could not make public courses, and we could not create our own courses. Now we can create our own courses AND make them public. 

In my Twitter4Canvas Workshop, one of the first things I do is to walk people through creating a practice course where they can experiment with Twitter, while also using that as an opportunity to urge them to learn some other tricks, like creating a course card image, etc.

Twitter4Canvas: Step 1: Create a new Canvas course space. 

I have a blog post here where I dream about how cool it would be if our Library, Writing Center, all the student support services, built simple Canvas spaces so that we could connect and share through the Canvas platform:

Canvas for Everyone: Connecting and Sharing – Teaching with Canvas 

[jbuchholz]

Laura,

Our writing center has a canvas page where they have writing tutors that help students. It is a self-enroll course and once students are in they submit a paper and the writing center is notified, the paper is assigned to someone, and the process begins. Students have found it to be a great resource, especially since it is within canvas. The library also has a canvas spot in every course as well as links in the global navigation under a "Tools" folder that we created.

Jesse

[scottdennis]

My 12 yro niece makes courses in Free for Teacher for things that she wants to make sure we understand (like the life cycle of narwhals).  You can bet there will be a quiz!

[laurakgibbs]

Ha ha, that is so cute! I'm glad to know about Free for Teacher, esp. if they decide to take away student ability to create courses at my school. I was really impressed by my student who figured out that he could create his own Canvas course to use for a semester-long group project in another class where they wanted a "room of their own" so to speak. 🙂

[kona]

As part of our Canvas Instructor training - Canvas Instructor Training - we create a sandbox course for every faulty member. Instructors then build their first Canvas course in this sandbox and need to get it approved before they can teach/use Canvas for a real course.

Additional uses/examples for sandboxes

• Master courses
• Place for faculty to share content with each other (prior to Commons)
• Peer Review courses (we copy course content into a sandbox and have faculty peers review the courses).

In general we'll create as many additional sandbox courses as faculty want and we don't delete them unless an Instructor asks us to delete it.

[joseph_allen]

Thanks  @kona    We also have sandboxes, but I'm just trying to survey how people are using them.  In our first year, I had to create about 9,000 of them all at once.  I came up with a naming convention and did it with an API.  That all worked great.  Are you doing them as one offs, or is there some automation involved?

[kona]

Wow! We have nowhere near the number you have, so we manually create them as needed. Yet, we have a few "sandbox" courses running with students (these are for special projects, etc) and we have automated a few of them with enrollments.

[Stef_retired]

I saw an awesome micro LTI at InstructureCon 2016‌'s Hack Night. It's a plug-in that lets teachers click a button to automatically create a sandbox that they are also auto-enrolled in. I don't know all the details, but you can see more at GitHub - CUOnline/sandbox: LTI tool that generates sandbox courses in Canvas . The tool creators are  @alexander_kark1 ‌ and cjford‌. Maybe this will come in handy!

[laurakgibbs]

stefaniesanders‌ Now I am really curious if our set-up at OU is unusual: do most schools not allow instructors to create their own courses on the fly...? I had just been assuming it was a standard set-up. If it is not standard, I will make sure to be vigilant in lobbying to keep that as the set-up at OU since I really like it (see comment above).

[Robbie_Grant]

laurakgibbs,

Since we are integrated with our SIS, we wanted to make sure that all other courses were locked down to where faculty could not add students to the courses.  We actually had an instance of faculty adding students to courses that they were not registered for and at the end of the semester, when the instructor went to give the student an official grade in Banner, they could not.  Then the student would complain that they took a course and can't get credit for it.  We do have Non-academic courses, about 900 of them that range from student groups, to support shells for academic courses.  But we do not let faculty create their own shells.  You can see our request forms here:

Canvas Request Forms | Academic Technology | New Mexico State University 

Robbie

[kbickell]

All that - and allowing students into a course they are not registered for is (I believe) a FERPA concern.

[jbuchholz]

FERPA and Financial Aid, I would assume would be concerning in these courses.

[kbickell]

We do not allow instructors to create courses on the fly, primarily because we use an SIS import and don't want duplicate courses that confuse students or faculty (and we don't allow faculty to add/create students even in courses created by the SIS import, for this very reason). It's unfortunate faculty don't have this ability, but we'll gladly create any "informal" courses or users that faculty or staff need.

[laurakgibbs]

Thanks  @kbickell ‌ and  @Robbie_Grant ‌ for that insight! I will make sure to send a big thank-you to our Canvas administrator to let him know how much I appreciate the ability to create dedicated course spaces for my projects. It really has been one of my favorite things about Canvas compared to D2L, and now I will make sure to communicate up the food chain how much I like the way we have it configured for self-starters!

[kona]

I would hazard a guess that the schools that let faculty create their own courses (and add their own students) is in the minority. Similar to what was said before, because we use SIS imports to create courses we can then automatically add/drop students automatically.

[laurakgibbs]

 @kona  We also do SIS imports automatically, so my "official" courses are created automatically, and the add/drop process synchs up in almost-real-time with our SIS. So that all works great!

The ability to create courses is side-by-side with that.

I don't know if I can enroll students in courses; I never even thought to try. I just use the course-creation option to build my Canvas documentation and demonstration spaces. 🙂

[kona]

laurakgibbs, Thanks for the clarification! I don't think our faculty mind asking us to create their sandboxes for them. I've never turned anyone down and always try to get it created ASAP - so almost as soon as I get the request. 

[Stef_retired]

laurakgibbs, schools have different policies with regard to which roles can and cannot create courses, but many also restrict enrollments. For example, at one school where I trained teachers, teachers could create sandboxes at will, but strictly for their own use, because they didn't have any permissions associated with their role that allowed them to enroll students.

And one thing that was cool about the aforementioned micro LTI was that it not only allowed the teacher to click a button, create a sandbox, and be self-enrolled, but also that it automatically placed the newly-created course in the correct sub-account, thereby eliminating--or certainly lessening--the admin headache associated with ad hoc creation of course shells.

[laurakgibbs]

Thank you, stefaniesanders‌ . This was all so informative! And replying also to  @kona ‌ above, now that I know it's possible to let faculty create their own courses, I guess I would mind having to ask. If it's possible to lock down the enrollment problem, so that you knew students were not going to misunderstand the difference between real courses and "created" courses, it seems to me a good thing to let faculty create their own spaces. Why add an extra layer of work and waiting if it's not necessary...? The only time I really have to play around and experiment with stuff is on the weekends. Sure, I could work around having to wait... but I'm not sure I understand why.

But then, I'm more of an "act now, ask permission later" type of permission. I prefer to think that I'm trusted to be responsible about it, and I design my classes the same way: trust the students and then, if a problem does come up, deal with that problem on its own terms if/when it does come up.

In any case, it was very informative to learn about the different admin options and approaches here in this discussion! I'll have to rewrite that part of my Twitter4Canvas workshop to adjust for the fact that at some schools faculty can create their own spaces, while at others they may already have a sandbox prepared automatically (we don't; they just assume we'll create one if we need it), or they might have to write to their admin to get a sandbox. I had not thought about all those different possibilities before!

[curtain]

We let those in the Teacher role create their own non-official courses (but we do not let students do it).  It has been a successful way to help people get comfortable and to use it for non-course activities and increase their trust in the system.  We have all of the same concerns (people adding non-enrolled students to an official course, manually creating courses instead of using the official SIS-created course, etc) but those have been few and far between actually and the benefits of having those in the teacher course role be able to create courses outweighs the negative.

[laurakgibbs]

It's nice to know that another school took this same route! 🙂

[joseph_allen]

You may have just saved me $20,000 in development cost.  I'll look into that.  Thanks.

[Stef_retired]

Now I'm really looking forward to hearing how it goes,  @joseph_allen ! 😃

[jbuchholz]

Joe and All,

Here are NNU we allow faculty to have a sandbox, if they so desire. We create those shells and then give faculty access to them. We do not let our faculty create their own courses, nor do they have the ability to add or delete "student" accounts.  This is done for a number of reasons and even though there was resistance in the beginning, the benefits have far outweighed any rough conversations I have had to have with faculty. We are actually working on an automated community group based on a student's major that we are hoping will allow departments to incorporate all of the functionality of a community group with the benefits of online advising.

[awilliams]

We have the same setup. Faculty request sandboxes, not create them at will. Others have done a good job bringing up the pros/cons so I won't pile on, but I would like to add that we also try to find opportunities to spread the word about how awesome the Free-For-Teachers‌ instance is. At the risk of being slightly off topic, here are some community posts about FFT.

Free for teacher‌

Free and on Fire! or A Couple of Uses of Free For Teachers‌

https://community.canvaslms.com/message/51230-how-do-i-actually-use-free-for-teachers?sr=search&sear...‌

https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/free-for-teachers/blog/2016/03/03/the-benefit-of-free-for-tea...‌

[dgrobani]

Every new faculty at our university gets their own "dev shell." One of the weekly batch jobs I run queries our SIS for new teachers, creates a Canvas dev shell with their name in the course name, and enrolls them as teacher in the dev shell. We create on demand any additional shells that they might want.

[scottdennis]

My experience working with the 34 colleges in Washington before coming to work at Canvas largely matches what has already been shared here - most institutions do not allow faculty members to create dev shells but most also have some process for creating practice courses for faculty, either automatically or upon request.

A related question that I'm curious about is how common is it for teachers to maybe use the practice courses provided to them by their institution but also to have a Free for Teacher account?  I can see where in some cases this might be a way to get around institutional policies that might limit what a teacher wants to do. Before I had admin level access to a test instance of Canvas I had a whole family of students and teachers who logged into FFT.  I wonder how common this is.

[joseph_allen]

 @scottdennis  thanks for your thoughts on this topic.  We don't currently use or advocate the Free for Teacher accounts.  We do give all teachers a sandbox in its own sub account, but I'm in the process of possibly automating that with the help of instructure proserv resources. So if teachers end up with the ability to create their own sandbox courses instead of building them centrally, we would likely keep them in a single sub account without students.  I'm going to append the work "sandbox" to the title of whatever they create as well just so there is no confusion. 

[scottdennis]

Sandbox (not for credit)?

[laurakgibbs]

I'm struck by this use of Sandbox here. The kinds of courses I've been creating, and urging others to create, are not so much Sandboxes but instead something like what  @Robbie_Grant ‌ described in another comment here, where students groups and so on were creating Canvas spaces for real connecting and sharing, not just sandboxes for tinkering.

So, while I understand why admins might want or need to control that, I can see some real advantages in letting people in the system create their own spaces. At a certain point, you could delete ones that were inactive... and if schools right now are automatically creating sandboxes for faculty, I'm guessing that is a huge number of inactive courses result from that process. My guess would be that most faculty do not use the sandboxes prepared for them (?), and that probably few faculty create their own course spaces when given the opportunity (?). But those are just guesses.

If you compare letting faculty create their own as needed but with no automatic sandboxes (as at my school) to creating sandboxes automatically one per faculty (as apparently at other schools), I can definitely see the advantages of letting faculty create their own. I wonder if that is why they went this route at my school...?

I wrote a blog post just rhapsodically thinking about how cool it would be lots of organizations at my school were to make sure of Canvas this way as a content-sharing platform:

Canvas for Everyone: Connecting and Sharing – Teaching with Canvas 

And thanks to all that I learned here, I updated my Twitter4Canvas workshop instructions to reflect the range of configurations at different schools, which I had never even suspected:

Twitter4Canvas: Step 1: Create a new Canvas course space. 

I really appreciate all the different perspectives and approaches people shared here!

[kbickell]

We create "informal" courses for faculty & students quite often, for collaborations, committees, campus groups, etc. We see this different than a sandbox, which we define as faculty having for their own use & testing. We're happy to create & populate these upon request.

[kmeeusen]

Scott:

We had a program at our school where the faculty decided that they would use FFT instead of completing our required Canvas training to have courses in our Canvas account.

Bad bad juju that turned out to be, and they have since abandoned that practice, completed their training, and now use our Canvas account for their online courses.

Why "bad juju"? We were would not and could not support either students or teachers in the FFT courses, and yet they started with an expectation that we could and would. Once they figured out that it really was not something we had the ability to do, rather than some arbitrary preference, they switched over to our supported instance, and have been happy ever since!

KLM

[seufertc]

We also do not allow faculty to create their own courses, but will create a sandbox space on request. Our instructors can have as many spaces as they want, anecdotally some instructors have seven sandbox spaces. For instructors who are new to Canvas, we add a template to the sandbox space. Although not all subjects have their own templates, we have a few areas, such as Fire Science and Historical Preservation, which have their own templates.

[myerdon01]

I usually create a development shell that is private to each individual faculty member to use however they see fit. Some try out new things in it, others get parts of their courses ready to copy over into their live courses so that they don't ruin something in a course with students enrolled. I usually create these when new faculty are hired and they can use it while we go through Canvas training. However, what I am finding is that after the training, most never go back to their dev shell and it just sits there. I have recently gone in and deleted a bunch of dev shells from people that are no longer teaching here-what a chore, but it was getting to be such a mess! Here are a few things I have instituted for sandbox type courses since I have started as an admin here about a year ago:

1. Have a standard naming convention that is unique. I name using username_developmentshell so that there will never be 2 courses with the same names. (Before I took over as Canvas admin, there were several jsmith dev shells and I just found three that were named "Mike's Dev Shell" and they were for three different Mikes!)
2. Put all of the development shells or sandboxes in their own term. This makes it easy to find shells by filtering using term and it keeps them in one place in case you want to do some clean up.
3. I keep personal dev shells to one per person. I have people ask for multiples for their different courses, but in those cases I make them a Master Course Shell for each class, and again, I put master courses in their own term. I try to differentiate between personal sandbox courses, for their personal files, training, and to try Canvas features, and master courses, where they can prepare material for individual courses and copy this content into their semester classes.

So far, this system makes sense for me and has been working well, I just wish more people would use their development shell to try out new features, I use my own on a daily basis!

[speden]

We use our SIS upload tool to automatically create and delete sandbox courses for faculty.

Every faculty member gets 3 sandbox courses that they can reuse.  They can also request additional courses that we manage manually.

We joined the faculty table with our SIS process- when a new faculty joins they get 3 new sandbox courses. When they are no longer a faculty member, the courses get purged with the SIS update.

[mcarruth]

At ECPI University, we have prepopulated courses we provided our teacher before each term.  If a teacher has not taught the specific class before or the class has significant changes since the previous time they taught the course, the teacher can request a copy of the Master course.  We provide a copy of the master course with all the date transforms like we do a live class. After 3 months, we delete the SANDBOX course. We use CanvasData for course creation time and Canvas ID and then use the CanvaAPI to delete the SANDBOX courses.

[j_c_turner]

Hi

we are creating a 'master' version of every module to allow the module team to develop content external to the live module. 

jim