Canvas sub-account best practices

[alaanizar]

Hi Community,

I have a question for you regarding the best practices used in managing Canvas Sub-accounts in a way to best integrate SIS systems.

We use Jenzabar Sonis as our main SIS system. We would like to integrate it with Canvas to automatically create courses per year or semester and bulk enroll students, teachers and TAs.

Here's an example of how Canvas Sub-account is managed in the present configuration:

University root account -> Science & Technology -> School of Architecture and design -> Architecture Diploma (6 years) -> Cohort 2022-2026-> Arch101, Arch102, ..etc (those are the courses)
Next year, a new cohort named Cohort 2023-2027 will be created.

I think this is a working approach as long as the students only see their courses, they don't rely on Sub-accounts for this.
However, from an Admin side, there should be a simple way to manage this to ease the update of the Roster either through SIS integration or with SIS Imports (flat csv files)

So here's what I'm thinking of:

[University root account] -> [School of Architecture and design] -> [Architecture Diploma (6 years)] -> [ARCH101] -> Arch101-202223-fall, Arch101-202324-fall, ..etc.
Between Brackets are Sub-accounts.
EACH COURSE has their own FINAL Sub-account, with versions of this course created each year when taught, and differentiated by the academic year/semester.
This way, the update of the Roster and the creation of courses will be very simple as changing the year from 202223 to 202324, while keeping all the other data static, like the course name, code (Arch101), Sub-account, ...etc.

The same Approach is valid for the scheme below:
[University root account] -> [School of Architecture and design] -> [Architecture Diploma (6 years)] -> Arch101-202223-fall, Arch101-202324-fall, Arch125-202223-Spring, ..etc.
All courses fall on their related Diploma Sub-Account

What do you think folks?
We are using SONIS from Jenzabar, but it's not yet linked to Canvas. what other universities are doing in this regard?

Thank you

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @alaanizar,

We have our subaccount structure as follows:

University

-SIS Courses

--College 1

--College 2

--College 3

-Non-Sis Courses

--Courses without students

---Work in Progress Courses

---Faculty Training Courses

---Testing

--Courses with students

---Orientation

We can't take our SIS courses lower than the college level because we have a ton of crosslisted courses which we'd just be randomly assigning to one department or another.  We also don't do any subaccounts based on terms, because we can already use terms to filter things as needed.  I think a lot of it comes down to preference and how much customization you can do.  I would usually say to use as many subaccounts as you can so you can customize permissions and things more easily, but one subaccount per course seems like it could be overkill.

-Chris

[alaanizar]

Thank you Chris for your reply. 

I do agree that a sub-account per course would kill the sub-accounts navigation and dropdowns whenever used.

I'd like to hear what other universities are doing, especially when syncing Canvas with Jenzabar Sonis that we are using as SIS.

Is the sync done from the SIS side or the Canvas side?

If not possible, here's what I'm thinking of.

I'd like to use one CSV file to create a course shell (canvas course) per course per term. They may all reside on the same sub-account, the Diploma sub-account (Bachelor of Computerscience) or separated by years (sophomore, freshman,...) or year1, year2, ...etc.

What do you think? We want to keep things simple to manage and update.

Thank you one again Chris.