Course administration
Q. How can a course administrator provide generic information, e.g. at the programme level?
A. We recognise that 'one size does not fit all' and your Learning Technologist will work with your team to organise the information that supports your teaching and learning in various types of Canvas containers; e.g. Subject Courses, Shared Teaching Courses etc. for award-bearing programmes of study. In general, a module/paper ‘course’ area is used for teaching purposes, and the programme ‘course’ area is used for administrative purposes at the programme level (e.g. to hold handbooks).
Q. What’s the difference between the ‘Name’ and ‘Course code’ of a Canvas course?
The Name of a Canvas course is the main title of the course that appears in the Courses and Manage Courses list views, and also on the Dashboard and in the Calendar.
For example:
The Course code is the name that appears only in the course ‘breadcrumb’ on the Home page.
For example:
Currently, users with course-level roles, including Teacher and Course Administrator, are not able to edit the course Name and Course code – only users with the LCC and Unit Admin roles are able to do that. Course-level roles continue to be able to amend other course details within Settings > Course Details, including the course start and end dates:
Q. Is it easy to re-use a Canvas course year-on-year?
A. The philosophy under which Canvas operates is that at the end of the academic year, a teaching course should be 'rolled over' – there is a Manage Courses tool that you can use to create a copy of the course for the new academic year. The 'old' course will remain as the archive, thus allowing students to refer to earlier course materials, when necessary (they will see past courses under Past Enrolments on their dashboard).
Please refer to our pages on rolling courses over:
- Manage Courses (Rollover): the process
- Manage Courses (Rollover): how to do it
- Manage Courses (Rollover): reporting
Q. Do archived Canvas courses include student assignment submissions from that cohort in that particular year?
A. Yes. A teaching course will persist as an archive after you have rolled it over for the new academic year (see above how to roll courses over). The past course will contain the same cohort of students and all their activities, including assignment submissions. However, after a certain number of years, courses and users are removed from Canvas, according to data protection requirements.
Please see our page Deletion of user records and courses for more information on the deletion process and the time periods involved.
Q. Is there 'version control' in Canvas (i.e. a way to restore a previous version of a page)?
A.
- There is no ‘versioning’ (as such) for all tools within a Canvas course or the entire course.
- If an entire Canvas course has been deleted, one can ‘undelete’ it by inserting ‘undelete’ at the end of the course URL.
- Within a Canvas course, the Pages tool provides an audit trail which allows one to ‘view page history’, and click to view or restore any of the previous versions.
Review the Canvas Community Guide: Viewing the history of a page Links to an external site.