Tool to Identify and Delete Unused Files

[christopher_phi]

Have you ever wanted the ability to know which files from the Canvas Files section are being used in course content or where they are being used? How about the ability to identify and delete unused, irrelevant files?  

Read below about a tool we have built to to solve these problems at Utah State University. 

This tool is now available as a commercial (but affordable!) product: 
TidyUP: File Cleanup Tool for Canvas
TidyUP Your Canvas Webinar

The Problem with Unused, Irrelevant Files

We have been using Canvas since the Summer of 2011 and one of the challenges is the accumulation of significant amounts of unnecessary and unused files in the files section as courses are copied forward. Some of those irrelevant files are past syllabi (i.e. syllabus-2011.pdf) or files from past years or duplicate files that were never used. Up until recently there was no way to identify which files were being used or not. 

We brought the problem to our data analyst  @meghan_lewis ‌ who was able to use Canvas Data to look at data on every file across our courses and determine whether there was a link to that file or not from the Canvas content.  Given that some instructors choose to make the files section visible to students we filtered out that data to determine what percentage of files were being used. 

From that data we found that only 32.7% of the files in those courses were being used. In other words, over 67% of the files in those courses were no longer being used!

Old irrelevant files in courses in the files section are problematic for a number of reasons: 

1. More irrelevant files makes it more difficult for faculty (and students when the files section is visible) to find relevant content. 
2. When a student with disabilities requires accommodations in a course it is difficult to determine which files are are being used and need to be made accessible and time is spent making unused files accessible. 
3. LTI tools that work with files (i.e. Atomic Search or Ally) operate on the assumption that all files in the files section are relevant to the student which has caused problems in our use of those tools. 

With an understanding of the problem, we set out to provide a solution to help instructors better understand how their course files are used. 

The Solution

To address the challenges around file management we have build a "File Cleanup LTI Tool" that allows faculty and instructional designers to identify and delete unused files and empty folders and see how files are being used.

The reception to this tool has been very positive on our campus and we are excited to share how it works to measure interest on whether there might be interest from others to merit the development work that would be needed to make the tool available for use by others. If you are interested take a moment to review the tool below and leave a comment with any feedback or to us know if this is something that would be helpful to your institution! 

Overview of the File Clean Up Tool

The File Cleanup LTI Tool is installed at a course level and is visible to instructors from the course navigation: 

Instructions 

When you click on the tool the following information and instructions shows up at the top of the tool: 

This section of the tool provides brief instructions and a chart that shows what percentage of the files in the course are in use. There is also a note at the top of the tool that shows when the information displayed in the toolwas last updated - we currently Canvas data that is updated nightly, but hope to use Canvas Data Live Events in the future. 

Warnings

Below the instructions we present a warning that the tool is still in beta and a conditional warning that shows up when the instructor has made the files section available to students: 

The first warning for courses that display the files section makes sure that those instructors know that some files may be used by students even if there are no links from Canvas content.  The second beta warning lets the users know that we are currently unable to determine if there are links to content from a limited type Canvas data (outcomes, rubrics, conferences, calendar items and quiz question answer submissions). We hope to remedy this with the move to Canvas Data Live Events.   

List of Course Files

List of Unused Files

Now the good stuff - the default view of the tool that lists all of the unused files from the course with the ability to preview, search, select, and delete those files: 

Instructors can quickly select all unused files and delete them or click on the file name to preview an individual file, sort by file name or date created or search for an individual file by file name or file type (i.e. all PDF files).  Files can be deleted individually or all at once. When you delete a file an "Are you sure" message pops up:  

Then a confirmation message appears showing how many file were deleted: 

Once the files are deleted the list of files updated and the chart at the top of the page is updated to show how many unused files are in the course. 

List of All Course Files

You can also view a list of all files in a course including those that are in use: 

Note in this view there is a link for files in use that users can click on to go to the page where the file is used.

List of Empty Folders

We found that deleting files left a number of empty folders, so we recently added a tool that identifies those empty folders so they can be deleted individually or all at once. This tool is updated live rather than relying on the nightly Canvas Data dump.  

Summary

While we are still gathering feedback from users and continuing to add features and improve the user experience there has already been significant interest and use of the tool by instructors excited to be able to clean out their files. Our Disability Resource Center has also greatly appreciated the ability to work with professors to clean out old files and focus their work on files that are being used in the course.  At an institutional level it has been great to start to see the number of useless files start to go down instead of up and instructors copy their courses forward each semester. 

If you have questions or interest in using this is a tool, please leave a comment below. Follow this post for updates on the availability of the tool in the future. 

Additional Resources 

Below are some Canvas ideas and other resources that also may be of interest: 

1. Canvas Idea: Indicate Where Files Are Linked Within a Course
2. Canvas Idea: Deployment Status for Course Files Canvas Idea
3. Canvas Idea: When Searching Files, Show File Path (Breadcrumb) Idea
4. If you are interested in how often files are downloaded in your course, take a look at this Google Tag Manager recipe anyone can use to track file downloads. 

Thank you! 

(header photo by bandi, CC License)

[tuk03990]

I'm an instructional designer that supports fully online classes at a university. Whether it's from a course copy or just uploading new files and not deleting old ones, we get stuck with a TON of old files in the files section. This tool would be great!!! When will it be available?!

[christopher_phi]

Hello everyone,
First of all, thank you for all of the interest in this tool everyone!  @ludovig  has been hard at work and the tool has been completely rebuilt so that it can now be used without relying on Canvas Data so that it will be easier for other schools to use. In addition, some new features have been added: 

• File icons and image previews.
• More information about files (file size, last updated).
• Ability to filter files by the type of file (PowerPoint, HTML etc.)
•  A warning to users if there is Flash content in a course. 
• Information about Canvas pages and assignments (published, empty, linked to,  in modules, etc..) and the ability to delete multiple pages or assignments at once.

Beta Test

We recently rolled the new version of the tool out to our instructors at Utah State University and so far so good. We are now ready for a couple of beta testers to help us try it out and identify any remaining bugs. If you are interested in helping us kick the tires please fill out this form.

Soon Available through Cidi Labs

In order to provide support for the tool and continue to develop it we have partnered with CIDI Labs and the tool will be called TidyUp. We already work with Cidi Labs to make Design Tools available and they are fantastic to work with.

I don't have a release date yet, but assuming our beta tests go well we are hopeful that the tool will be available early in 2019. Follow this thread for updates or you can sign up for updates from Cidi Labs. 

Thanks!

Thanks and let me know if there are any questions - this has been incredibly helpful to clean out our course content and we are excited to share it with others! A couple of screenshots of new features are available below:

Screenshot from the File Delete section

This screenshot shows the Flash warning, file filter, files previews and file size:

Screenshot from the Canvas Page Information Section

This shows a screenshot from the page information tool where you can see all of the pages in a course, when they were updated and whether they are published, linked in a module, have content or linked from other content.

[Boekenoogen]

I was really excited to use this tool until I found out that you are going to make people pay for it. 

[christopher_phi]

Thanks  @jrboek ‌, I appreciate your comment and would like to share that we spent considerable time looking at whether there might be a way to offer the tool to the community for free. However, the work involved in making the tool available to work with other institutions required significant resources and a complete rewrite of the app and setting up a backend infrastructure that has required a lot of time on our side. 

We have gone down the open source route before and I love the idea of that, but we currently don't have the resources available to support ongoing maintenance, customer support, and new features that we would like to provide. Already, this has allowed us to build out some new features and improvements in the tool that would have been difficult to make otherwise. 

While there will be a cost available for the product that might limit access in some ways, we believe strongly that this direction allows us to increase access to a better product at an affordable price with fewer technical barriers and better support. 

For anyone looking for an update, things have gone well with the beta testing and I hope to have an update sometime next week on a release date. We are working to make the tool available as affordable option available through CIDI Labs. 

[christopher_phi]

Hello everyone, 

I am happy to announce that TidyUP is now available from Cidi Labs. You can find information about it from https://cidilabs.com/landing/tidyup-for-canvas-cleanup/, including a video. 

The tool has come a long ways from when we shared it at Instructurcon last year and lots of additional functionality has been added. Below is a quick overview of some of the functionality: 

1. Identify and delete all unused files in your course
2. View a list of all files in a course and where they are used. 
3. View all folders in a course, delete empty folders and identify parent folders. 
4. View a list of all course content (pages, discussions, quizzes, etc...) and view information about each content item such as when it was published, whether or not it is in a module, is published or has content. This also includes the ability the delete multiple items at a time. 

A more in-depth overview of features is available at: https://cidilabs.instructure.com/courses/2854/pages/overview-of-features

They are very excited to have people try it out, share feedback and continue to build out additional functionality. Regarding pricing, they have shared that "Pricing is much less than a DesignPLUS Design Tools subscription and discounts are offered when customers license more than one Cidi Labs solution or for multi-year contracts." 

If you have any questions or would like a demo, more information about pricing or event a sandbox they are standing by ready to help. 

Enjoy!

[whitney_clay]

I would love this feature as well for use with Ally accessibility checker. What happened to the feature request? I still need a feature to help identify unused files and also to identify where a file is being used in the course.