Canvas: Explaining Canvas Course Shells

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The Basics - What is a "Canvas course shell"?

When you build and organize Canvas content for students... and, when those students see all the wonderful things you have done, and take your quizzes, and complete your assignments... all of this creating, and viewing, and interacting will be occurring within a Canvas course shell.

A Canvas course shell is the basic container you will use (as an instructor) to deliver content to your students through Canvas.

A course shell can be used for:

  • time-table courses, such as "Physics109 Physics in the Arts, Fall 2019 (001)"
  • non-time-table courses, such as
    • Compliance & institutional training, (e.g. "Radiation Safety Training 2019", "Preventing Sexual Harassment and Sexual Violence at UW-Madison")
    • Life Long Learning courses (e.g. "FoodWIse Online Training", "Online Teaching for Extension Educators")
    • Supplemental courses (used in conjunction with a time-table course)
    • Canvas sandbox courses (playgrounds to practice), such as "Jane Doe's sandbox"

Each Canvas course shell can contain any number of sub-items, such as files, pages, quizzes, assignments, announcements, discussions, links to videos, images, etc.

Each Canvas course shell will have a list of "people", who will have various levels of access to the contents of the course. These "people" include students, other instructors, teaching assistants, and instructional support staff.

Canvas course shells appear on your Canvas dashboard if you have been added to that course shell, whether as an instructor or a student, or any of several other Canvas roles.

For brevity, this training material will now refer to "a Canvas course shell" as "a Canvas course", or simply, "a course".

Time-Table Courses

Origins

The most common scenario at UW-Madison is a Canvas course, being used by an instructor, for an official time-table course. In such a case, the Canvas course is tied directly to the time-table course, as it is defined in the university Course Catalog. The Canvas course inherits from the Course Catalog the course title, the course instructor(s), and the course section structure (among other data points).

At least six weeks prior to the start of a new semester, a new empty Canvas course is generated for each course listed in the Course Catalog. They are created by an automated batch process, that is overseen by the Learn@UW-Madison team. If a particular Canvas course is not appearing on your dashboard, it may be because a) you were not listed in the Course Catalog as an instructor, or b) the new Canvas course shells have not yet been generated for the semester.

(If you wished to begin development of a time-table course, but the corresponding Canvas course shell is not yet available, we recommend you use a Canvas sandbox course. Refer to the section "Sandbox Courses" below. Once the official Canvas course shell has been generated, it is quite easy to import the content from the sandbox course shell.)

Enrollment management

Enrollment in these time-table courses are captured and maintained by UW-Madison's Student Information System (SIS). The enrollment within SIS is synched up with the enrollment in the corresponding Canvas course shell. (Those enrolled students will be located in the People area of the Canvas course .) As students add and drop a given course, Canvas and SIS synch up several times a day to ensure the student roster is accurate within the Canvas course.

Non-Time-Table Courses

Origins

Canvas non-time-table course shells are NOT automatically generated. Instead, they are manually created by the Learn@UW-Madison team, after being explicitly requested by university faculty or staff. If you need such a course, you must request one through our online Non-Credit Canvas Course Request Form Links to an external site..

Enrollment management

Enrollment for non-time-table courses are managed one of three ways:

  • Manually, requiring the instructor (or a proxy with appropriate permissions) to add "students", or
  • Self-enroll, requiring students to follow a link and enter a code to be automatically enrolled, or
  • Open, meaning anyone (within the university or without) can enter the course by using a publicly accessible URL.

Each of these options are explained in greater detail in the Canvas Guides.

Caveat

It's worth remembering that Canvas was designed with time-table courses in mind. Many traits of time-table courses do not apply to non-time-table courses, and vice versa. For example, time-table courses typically have hard start and stop dates; while non-time-table courses often do not. Enrollment in time-table courses is handled by the Registrar's Office, which relieves instructors of all that responsibility; while non-time-table courses require manual enrollment management of, sometimes, thousands of students.

If you are working with non-time-table courses in Canvas, and are encountering a challenge trying to optimize Canvas functionality, contact LearnUWSupport@doit.wisc.edu for assistance.

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