[ARCHIVED] Training Course w/ Gradebook Data

[becky6]

Hi Everyone,

We are looking to develop some hands-on training activities for our instructors, in particular, with the gradebook. I'd like to have class set up with fake students and data for the gradebook. Then I'd like to ask them to go in and complete certain tasks, like apply late policy, change or update grades, etc. We currently have instructors create sandbox courses when they first join, but this does not include any assignments or data. I'm curious if anyone has created training courses with fake student data before and would be willing to share how you went about it. Thanks in advance!

Becky

[caroline_foley]

Hi  @becky6 ! Not sure if you found an answer for this through other means. Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, I have a couple suggestions.

If you are an Admin and are just trying to set up a sample training course that you will use to show faculty, you can Act as User and add a couple examples in that sample course. Of course, you would just want to ask those users before you did this (I selected some staff that have Canvas accounts but don't really use them) and then you would just create various samples while you were the users. Then go back into your account and add some Teacher examples as well (grading, comments, etc...). If you have a super small number of faculty, you could also use this option to set up the sandbox courses for them in advance rather than my next option.

If you wanted your faculty to be more hands on about it and it's a live training (whether online or in person), you could have them all add the other participants (or a small ratio if the group size is big) to their sandbox course, do a list of tasks or divvy the tasks among the participants in each other's sandboxes, and then have them go back into their respective sandboxes to view the Gradebook and do some of the teacher tasks. You could frame it as they are learning the student side of the Canvas submission experience too, which is helpful if they get any student questions about this.

For the second option, you could probably tweak it so it works asynchronously as well, but it might just require more planning.

Hope this helps!

[becky6]

Thanks so much for your reply @caroline_foley ! I like the idea of having other instructors complete the "assignments" in each others' sandbox courses, because then they can get hands on and tweak things to see how they change in real time. 

[wcuFerni]

Thank you for this post. I also just created a post in the community for something similar. We are trying to replicate student data in each of our facutly sandbox courses so they can practice how to interact with students. We are currently looking into a script that would access a list of courses and perform student activity. 

[sharon_kitching]

I'd be interested in that - we have such issues getting people to understand 'how it looks' even with student view, and then there are all the LTI that have no student view.