Can I add a teacher to an archived class to share resources from it?

Question

There is no + button in the people section of an archive class that I would like to share with a new teacher of that class in order to share resources from it.  Is there another way I could share that class with this teacher?

BrianLester · Accepted Answer

One option would be to copy the course to a current (or the default) term and then add your colleague to the copied course.

SusanNiemeyer · Accepted Answer

You can also "send" materials from a completed course to a colleague. If there's a lot to share, note that you can "send" modules, and your colleague will be able to download them into her course. I recently did this, and it was super fast and easy.

NoahBoswell · Accepted Answer

Hey @TaraRougle ,

@SusanNiemeyer and @BrianLester pretty much covered it… once a class is concluded, you are unable to add people, modules, or other resources.

If you are someone that has access to a paid canvas account (meaning your school/district pays for canvas), then your admin can go in and unconclude the course, copy it, and do other things like that, or you may be able to do it as well depending on your permissions available and allowed by your admin. If you are using Free for Teacher, then you will need to make a copy of the course and add that individual to it, or if you want the course unconcluded (unarchived), you need to reach out to canvas support, as the canvas employees are the ones that have the admin rights for the free for teacher edition.

I hope this helps! Also, thank you Susan and Brian for contributing, very much appreciated.

Edit: I thought I’d also add this on. If you’re able to and allowed by your institution, you can also utilize Canvas Commons to share resources, as well. Or share it with individual people as Susan mentioned as well. Hope that helps, too.

Chris · Accepted Answer

In addition to all of the great info provided by @NoahBoswell, @SusanNiemeyer , and @BrianLester, I wanted to bring up one more point around his question...

At my institution, we do not allow teachers other than the official instructor to be added to the official course shells with students for FERPA (in the USA) and privacy reasons.  Alternate teachers shouldn't generally be able to see grades students received in other courses (at least for higher-ed), so sharing content this way presents a problem.  What we do instead when teachers want to share course content is make them a sandbox site, adding both teachers to that site.  Teacher A can import from their real course into the sandbox site, Teacher B can then import from that sandbox site into their future real course.  Your Canvas admins would generally set the site up, unless you have permission to do so, but it's a pretty quick thing to do so hopefully they'd be willing to go that route.

-Chris