Course Retention Policies

[FSUKevinKennedy]

My team is working towards a retention policy for Canvas courses. We just switched to Canvas a few years ago, and as such haven't had to think about old courses much before. My questions is: what is the retention policy at your campus? How long do you keep old courses?

[chriscas]

Hi @FSUKevinKennedy,

We enacted a retention policy a little over a year ago.  We are keeping courses for 7 years.  That may seem like a long time, but our undergrad students generally graduate in about 5 years, and we want them to retain access to all of their courses while they are earning their degree.  We were going to allow 6 years as a buffer, but at that point our legal team said if we could do 7 that would match up with a lot of legal timeframes (though they did not say we *had* to do 7).

Learning Management System Course Retention Policy < University of Michigan-Dearborn

-Chris

[kwiemer_hcc]

Hi Kevin,

We are starting our first full year of Canvas after a one year pilot.  We carried over our retention policy from our previous LMS (Moodle).  We keep the current year, plus three years back.  We are a Community College, so that covers the rotation of most courses within our programs.  We provide faculty with time to create archive copies in case they need them down the road.  This was also the policy at my previous institution and it worked well after being on Canvas for over 5 years.

[angela]

This has been a common question over the years - not only how many years to keep courses for, but how do you do that in a way that keeps your Canvas instance clean and organized. Instructure partners with K16, who now offers both archiving of courses from your previous LMS as well as Canvas. If this is of interest, you can reach out to your Customer Success Manager, or message me and I can connect you with your Canvas Sales contact. 

https://boundless.k16solutions.com/archive-canvas-data

[jasmiene_doming]

Hello! I represent a University here in the Philippines. Currently, we maintain past courses within our Canvas instance and keep it inactive or concluded as they are. Our perspective is that retaining old courses is valuable, as they provide a historical record of our students' learning experiences within the Learning Management System (LMS) in our university.

[gemma_sinclair]

We also keep concluded courses at our institution and have been using Canvas since 2016. Students have read-only access to concluded courses. If we were going to change to a different retention model, we would probably look at 7-8 years as assessment information is required for at least 7 years.

[JasonSimmons]

Hi Kevin,

A little late to this thread here, and it's not directly related to your question. But when your institution is ready to begin archiving courses, Instructure just rolled out a new offering called Canvas Archiving you can see at the link below.  It allows institutions to back up, access, and retrieve content at any time.—maintaining a cleaner Canvas instance.

https://www.instructure.com/services/canvas-archiving