Can a user profile (teacher) be restricted from uploading resources to Canvas Commons but still allowed to download them to their course?

[lsorroche]

From our institution's perspective, Canvas Commons is a very powerful and useful tool. However, as a large institution with a significant number of teachers to manage, we would like to restrict the ability to upload resources to Canvas Commons to admins only, while still allowing teachers to implement these resources in their courses. This would be very effective for modules containing activities that are part of the university's innovation pilots, as it would facilitate their implementation in classrooms. Thank you.

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hi there, @lsorroche ...

I guess my question for you would be...do you have a lot of people at your school currently (or previously) sharing content to Commons that would not be valuable for others to also import into their own course(s)?  Assuming that you are a Canvas administrator, have you looked at the "Stats" page to get an idea of who is (or has been) sharing content to Commons?  Maybe it's only handful of people each semester?  Maybe it's people sharing things at random?

How do I view resource statistics in Commons? - Instructure Community - 1807

My take on this...and I realize I am not fully aware of what guidelines you might have already established...is that it's not hurting anything for people to share resources to Commons if they think that those resources will benefit others.  Do you allow them to share to the wider global Canvas community, for example?

To get to the root of your question...no, there is not a way to prevent people from sharing content to Commons.  There are some settings in the Admin >> Account Settings, but there's not anything that completely disallows people from sharing content to Commons but yet they can still import items from Commons into their own courses.

[lsorroche]

Hi Chris! Thanks for your thought-provoking questions. We are a very large institution of higher education and completely online, with more than 500 users with the role of teacher. We made the switch to Canvas recently and the learning curve is different for each user.  We haven't applied Canvas Commons yet, but we are analyzing what the critical issues might be, we think this could be one, since we have to make sure that all the classrooms follow a standard for the more than 90,000 students we have. Thanks for your thoughts.