Course Creation Best Practices

[lukekm]

When we do the automatic course creation process from our SIS, our current process is that all courses default to being Published.

I'm curious as to what other schools (Higher Education) do and pros/cons. For us, by having the courses default to being published, we get fewer calls from students confirming if they are enrolled in a class, plus it's one less "click" for faculty to "Publish" their courses. On the other hand, if a faculty member chooses NOT to use the platform for their teaching, and leaves it published the data seems a little skewed.

Thanks in advance for your input.

[mzimmerman]

Hi @lukekm 

We create our courses as "Unpublished".  This allows instructors to choose when (or if) they want to make the course available to students.  Students can still see the course under Courses > All Courses even if it is unpublished, and we put up an announcement at the start of each semester reminding students how to do this.

[dbrace]

Hi @lukekm,

Before my institution was a Canvas customer, we used an LMS (it no longer exists) that did not require faculty to "publish" a course shell. The course shell was immediately available to students when its start date and time occurred.  We got a lot of support calls if a faculty member was not using the course shell.

As a Canvas customer, when our course shells are created by our SIS to LMS data transfers, we do not automatically publish them.  We tell students to check their enrollments in either our SIS (for real-time status) or in Canvas at Courses > All Courses (within 24 business hours). We get support calls because of students not reading announcements and because of misleading/inaccurate information shared by faculty (e.g. even if published beforehand and a faculty member wants students to be able to, we do not allow students to get into a course shell before it is scheduled to start).

My Department's preference continues to be to not automatically publish course shells and this is mostly for consistency when providing technical support to faculty and students.

-Doug

[RachelSalmon]

If a faculty member is building out their content/assignments ahead of time, they may not want students to have access to what they're doing as they are working on the course. Being able to build with assignments/pages/modules all set up in a way that you want so that when the course is published everything is ready to go, is helpful. If you have to build but keep everything unpublished, faculty might miss something when they go to publish individual content. Our institution defaults to unpublished for this reason. We do see some support calls from students who don't see their course ahead of classes start but we have anecdotal evidence that our faculty like having control of when students can see the courses. 

[dbrace]

Good points, @RachelSalmon.

-Doug