Organizing Our Development Shells

Question

Hello Everyone,

I’m the DE System Administrator Our District.

I’m reaching out to you regarding Canvas and development shells for professors.

I would like to know if your DE department does provide more than 1 development shell to professors.

If yes, how does the DE department manage the extra course shells?

Does your department have a practical way for managing that?

Also, is your college using any system or vendor for archiving your old courses online?

I really appreciate your help with this and look forward to learning from you.

JasonSimmons · Accepted Answer

Hello @IlariaHenein—I can't answer all your questions, but I can tell you that Instructure recently rolled out a Canvas Archiving solution so institutions can back up and secure their LMS data, control user access, and reduce clutter in their Canvas LMS. The content can also be easily synced back to your Canvas LMS at the push of a button whenever you need it. Full disclosure: this is done in partnership with the company I work for, K16 Solutions. Below are a couple of case studies featuring Canvas LMS customers who are using this new solution:

Collin College archiving story

Seminole State College of Florida archiving story

Hope that helps!

Thanks,
Jason Simmons,
SVP, K16 Solutions

JessicaDeanSVC · Accepted Answer

Hi there @IlariaHenein! At my institution, we are happy to give instructors as many dev shells as they need, as many use one per course. We have a separate Term in our instance for dev shells, just like we do for academic courses. At this time, we do not do any sort of management around that or archiving. We have no storage restrictions right now with our Canvas contract, so we leave the courses alone unless asked by the instructor to remove some of their shells.

We have learned that this creates a looooooong list of courses for some folks, so we customized our Canvas javascript to include a drop-down menu in the courses list to let folks sort their courses by term. This helps A LOT with the big list.