Canvas Insider Journal - Week One of an Academic Term

Trend-spotting client needs, and how I'm able to address them efficiently

The break between academic terms can be much different in the busy level depending on what time of year it is. Over the summer break, many faculty want nothing to do with technology before the usual frenetic start to the academic year. Thus a huge amount of requests for help with Canvas courses come in right before the start of fall term.

After fall term concludes, there will probably be a few weeks’ break time the Winter term, so some faculty will want nothing to do with technology during the Christmas holiday and New Year season. Thus, a huge amount of requests for help with Canvas courses come in right after January 1 before the start of the Winter term.

If your institution is on a quarterly system, like my Western Washington University is, there often is only one week between Winter and Spring quarters. Most faculty don’t have enough time to take a break from their technology, and are busy preparing for the Spring term, thus a huge amount of requests for help with Canvas courses come in as soon as Winter term concludes all the way through the start of the Spring term.

This is a peek at what Week One looks like for a Canvas Admin at Western Washington University*:

Students register for courses, but don’t immediately see their Canvas course appear - Unlike the Google Docs experience, where changes are made within seconds, it takes a few hours for the Student Information System (SIS) to transmit enrollment/disenrollment delta changes to Canvas courses. Patience is appreciated, especially when the institution’s SIS infrastructure experiences disruptions of service at the start of the term, which can prevent courses from appearing in numerous students’ Canvas dashboards.

Combine/merge/cross-list courses - Just like Week Zero, last-minute cross-lists occur in order to provide students in multiple sections access to course content.

Importing wrong course content - I often get added to some faculty’s Christmas card list when they realize the wrong course content got imported into their course, and they are unsure how to get the right content added. With my Canvas Admin superpowers, I’m able to see which course was incorrectly imported from, reset course content, and use my history of knowing my clients (something AI can’t do) to import the most-recent course’s content for them. I enjoy the enthusiastic responses from my faculty when I’m able to help fix their course in quick fashion.

Adding students to courses with a role other than student - In efforts to help provide students access to course content so they don’t fall behind when on a waitlist to enroll in a course, some faculty will add students to a course with an elevated role. These elevated roles give students rights to courses that may include access to quiz answers and the course gradebook, something most institutions do not want students to have access to. By downloading an enrollment report from the Provisioning menu in my Admin zone, and by doing some Excel-fu with filtering rows for duplicate roles in a course, I can message a teacher to gently make them aware of the potential elevated access with their adding students outside of official enrollment methods. Most are appreciative of the information shared, and for my confirming only the student role is present in their course roster.

Lab course creation and targeted student enrollment - Some departments at my University have a lab component with TA instruction in their academic course. To avoid extensive gradebook bloat, I have been able to save a growing number of faculty and TAs time each term by doing the following:

• Create multiple non-academic lab courses with customized titles (via courses.csv SIS upload)

• Create specific sections related to the SIS ID of the academic course (via sections.csv SIS upload)

• Enrolling TAs with the teacher role and hundreds of students into specific course sections behind-the-scenes without any action needed to accept a course invitation (via enrollments.csv SIS upload).

This standardized naming convention, developed with the primary lecturing faculty, results in quick access to their lab courses in their Canvas dashboard. Winner Winner Canvas dinner.

As I shared in my Week Zero post, this is a bit of a “time capsule” for a future Canvas Admin at WWU to reference, whether it be a successor or a temporary fill-in while I am absent from office, either from taking vacation or after getting hit by a truck. Or it might be a helpful conversation starts for one of my fabulous Canvas Insiders out there? Drop me a line if you’d like to learn more about how I quickly respond to first-week course requests in Canvas-land!

Thanks for your time.

-Chris

*Western Washington University has about 15,000 students, 1,000 faculty, and about 2,000 staff...give or take. Western gives teachers of academic courses a large amount of agency in developing their academic courses without standardized blueprint or template courses. Western chooses to not require teachers to pass any formalized training before gaining access to their academic course(s). Teachers are able to rename their courses if they choose, and are permitted to add LTI Apps from the available selections in their course. Western’s faculty have the ability to cross-list their courses for an academic term, import content from a previous term, and are able to access prior-term academic courses with read-only rights. They are able to add other WWU personnel to academic courses in numerous roles, save for the student and observer roles. And many other permissions are given to teachers…

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