End of term procedures?

SethBattis

I'm wrestling with how Canvas classifies courses as "available" to different audiences. My measure of availability is that the course shows up in the list of courses returned by a call to:

GET https://instance.instructure.com/api/v1/courses/state=available

This particular API matters to me because we use a planner tool in-house to help students develop real plans around their homework assignments that, well… it works better when it can ask for a list of courses that the student is currently in.

What I've determined empirically so far is:

• If the course is unpublished, it's not available to either teachers or students
• If the course is published an in a term that is current or past but has not been "hard concluded" (either by clicking the "Conclude Course" button before the end of term or making a DELETE call to the course endpoint later on), it is available to teachers and students.
• If the course is hard concluded, it is not available to teachers or students.
• If the account-level "Restrict students from accessing courses after end date" is set, it has no impact on availability of courses (at least in sub-accounts). I have not experimented with locking that setting, because… why bother?
• If the course-level "Restrict students from accessing course after end date" is set, it is available to teachers and students receive a truncated version of the course that is just the id and "access_restricted_by_date": true, which is progress of a sort.

I've seen a number of work-arounds mentioned (e.g. moving all courses from past terms to an admin-only sub-account), which kind of defeats the purpose of faculty having access to their old courses both for archival and re-use purposes.

I'm leaning towards just writing a (not very complicated) script to hard-conclude all courses in a term that I can run the day after the term ends, but… I'm doing it with very ill grace.

Do others have perspective?

melodyc_lam

@SethBattis Just curious, have you used the "masquerade" ability through the API or is this a tool that's run on a student's account (so you can query the API within custom JS)?

Also, is there a reason why you don't want to restrict students from accessing courses after the end date? I find that setting to be valuable since often content gets re-used and that presents cheating by students. That setting does get respected by course access, no matter if the course gets concluded or not.

I'm at a K-12 and we have subaccount admins available at the school subaccount level -- these admins also get access to the Archive subaccounts that we have to store previous courses. That being said, we also communicate before the end of the year what happens to courses and give a very generous grace period (until June 30) to backup course content through the export function or copying into a sandbox for re-use/editing (we don't archive sandboxes). We also only hard conclude courses at the end of the year, not at the end of the term (as students can't access courses after the end date), since we have a mixture of terms (we have 3 calendars + yearlong and semester termed courses).

I do have a series of scripts that I run in the summer to clean up courses that utilizes the SIS import system (leveraging Canvas to help me conclude and move courses instead of doing an API call) -- let me know if you want to see examples. Hope this helps!