Do you just delete unused Canvas shells/empty courses?

[mbmacdonald]

Greetings,

Fellow HIED LMS admins, do you just delete unused and/or empty Canvas shells at some point in the semester?

We currently have hundreds every semester. We load in Canvas courses very early, often months before the start date, which means that many of the courses get cancelled, and all enrollments get deleted. But the empty course shell remains.

We also have course shells that just do not get used because the "course" is an internship, independent study or some other type of the course that the professor does not want to use Canvas for. These often have only one student.

I'm not sure why it never occurred to me to just delete these. What are the possible pros and cons of doing this? Those who do it: any suggestions/hacks?

Those who don't do it: why? Is there some other entity, like the registrar, who wouldn't want you to do it?

Finally, I also thought that maybe I could set up diffing for courses on my SIS integration. Currently we only perform diffing on enrollments. Again, I'd love to hear the pros and cons of doing this.

Thanks for your feedback.

[chriscas]

Hi @mbmacdonald,

We start sending SIS data to Canvas about 2 months ahead of a given semester, so while it's not as far out as you, we do have tons of changes/additions/cancellations to the schedule too.  In addition to some of those changes leaving course shells with no enrollments behind, the way we do our crosslistings also leaves a lot of empty shells behind.

Now on to your main question...  We do not delete these course shells, mainly because they are only really seen by admins and we can easily ignore them if we want to.  There's also the off chance that someone would delete the wrong course shells by accident, or delete something that had no enrollments now but actually did have data in there from deleted enrollments that we could potentially want to re-capture later.

We do now have a 7 year retention policy in place, so every course, whether it had content or not, is deleted after 7 years.  This helps us manage our overall storage used and keeps things neater for faculty and other admins (not seeing so many terms and courses in menus).  I have a script that does these deletions automatically to minimize the chance for human error.

I hope this helps a bit!

-Chris

[johnod120]

Could I ask: do you export and backup the courses that you delete or do you just delete with the thinking that 7 years is long enough to retain that information?  We're new to Canvas this year and trying to think about the best way to handle cleanups in the future.

Thanks!

[chriscas]

Hi @johnod120,

We send 60, 30, and 5 day notices via email about the upcoming course deletions to the instructor(s) of record (listed as teachers in Canvas).  The email gives instructions on how the faculty can save anything they would like (content, grades, etc) and makes it clear they must take action quickly if they want to save anything.

-Chris

[mbmacdonald]

Thanks for the info. Those are the same reasons we don't currently delete. However, our "data" is showing that there are large numbers of unpublished courses - which may look suspicious to stakeholders/exec staff. It also makes the metric useless for measuring actual adoption. So that's why I bring it up.

[chriscas]

We auto-publish all courses with enrollments on the first day of the term.  We do this partly because our faculty are expected to use Canvas in some ways, even for completely in-person courses, but also to reduce student confusion and the inevitable flood of "where is my course" questions to our Canvas support team.  We also unpublish any previously published courses that do not have any enrollments anymore.  This effective means that for us, the published status can be used as an indicator that the course has/had students enrolled, which is really nice to see without having to start cross-referencing other reports.  If we want to try to track people who aren't using Canvas at all, we can use the unused report or the zero activity report, and filter to only the published courses.  Overall it's actually pretty useful, but I know the same methods will not work at every school/institutiuon.

-Chris

[CarlThelen]

Hi, Chris, I'd be really interested in a script to automatically delete unused courses. In particular, those with zero students, or those with zero teachers. Can you share or email? cthelen at stmarys dash ca.edu?

[CynthiaEdwards1]

@chriscas We also have a similar policy: 7 year retention. Our instructional tech specialist go through Canvas 1-2x per year and clear out courses that are 7 years old or older.

[mbmacdonald]

@chriscas @CynthiaEdwards1, thanks so much for this useful info. I had not thought about a course retention policy at all, but now I am thinking about it.

When you delete old courses, does it reduce  File Storage footprint for the account (the numbers that are listed in statistics)? I'm especially interested in the media storage. So in other words, when you delete a course, does it remove any media that was uploaded into that course from the account media storage? It seems like the answer should obviously be yes, but I wanted to check.

Thanks!

[chriscas]

Hi @mbmacdonald,

You could go down quite the rabbit hole when looking into Canvas storage and/or quotas .  I'm going to say that right now, deleting courses doesn't generally change the used storage space for at least a couple reasons:

• the delete is more like a soft-delete that can be recovered in many cases.
• files / media objects may be used in more than one course, but they are apparently only stored one time on the back-end to optimize the space used.

With that being said, we still chose to implement a retention policy, as it's a good routine to have, and we are fairly confident that Instructure will have to actually start hard-deleting things or charge institutions for more storage at some point in the future.  It used to be that "storage is cheap" and we had unlimited google drives, dropbox accounts, etc, but in the last couple years that trend seems to be reversing and more and more services are adding limits or lowering their previous limits.  We don't know for sure that Instructure will make changes, but it seems only logical at this point.

Hope this helps a bit!

-Chris

[DrTerriC]

could you share more details on the retention policy you use.. we have some faculty that want out of courses because of clutter from previous semesters - but I am not sure it is a good idea to separate faculty from previous courses that we are retaining. 

[JaredWall]

We are transitioning from a self-hosted Moodle to Canvas in the Spring. Right now we are working through the setup with instructure. One thing to consider with storage is that their quotas for course storage (according to instructure) is to prevent a course from running slowly. Check your quotas in the admin settings.

Since we have been self-hosting, we have always encouraged faculty to place audio and video files into a streaming service (drive, YouTube, etc.) to prevent these larger files from slowing down our instance. We plan to continue that recommendation.

I am also curious about the permenant deletion of courses as we tend to keep course archives for ten years. Need to see how this will work with their processes.

[chriscas]

Hi @JaredWall,

Just wanted to provide clarification on your statement: "Check your quotas in the admin settings. That setting does not stop someone from going over it."  The quota settings *do* actually prevent anyone form going over the limits set there.  Users would receive errors trying to add things that would put the course/user/group storage area over the limit.

-Chris

[JaredWall]

Then that should be communicated to the implementation team. As stated, that is exactly what I was told by the Instructure reps handling our integration and setup training. If it’s incorrect, my apologies.

edited original post to remove.

[chriscas]

Hi @JaredWall,

I think what your implementation team was probably trying to say is that the quotas you can set in the system (course / user / group) are not tied to any storage limits set in your Canvas contract.  For example, your contract may say have language that you have a 3TB overall limit.  With that 3TB limit in mind, you can figure out what you want to set your course / user / group quotas at to try to stay under 3TB total over the years.  The quotas you set in Canvas are definitely hard limits on each item.  However, the overall limit in your contract if something that's not enforced in the system at this time, but is more of a conversation between the school and Instructure when it comes time to renewals and such.  I always hesitate to post information like this in the community, as each individual contract may be different and this could all change at any time, so please keep that in mind as you read this (and especially for people reading this in the future).

Hope this helps a bit more.

-Chris