Old Canvas Courses

[wardcz1]

Is there anyway to archive Canvas courses in order to use the material next year? 

[chriscas]

Hi @wardcz1,

This depends a bit on how your school/institution has things set up, but I'd say in most cases your "old" courses will remain in Canvas for a while.  When a new year/term begins, you'll usually be able to import content from the old course into the new one pretty easily.  You may want to contact your local Canvas team (usually in the eLearning / IT / Digital Education areas) to verify that your old courses will still be accessible, and if not ask them what their recommended procedures for transferring course content would be.

Hope this helps!

-Chris

[JasonSimmons]

Hey Everyone,

Good question; last year, Instructure rolled out a new solution called Canvas Archiving powered by K16 Solutions; you can learn more about it here: https://www.instructure.com/services/canvas-archiving.

Canvas Archiving allows institutions to archive their Canvas LMS course content and push it back into the Canvas instance at any time. Several institutions are already using it. 

If you would like to speak with someone about it, my colleague Sam Yaghoubi would be happy to demo it for you. You can reach him at sam.yaghoubi@k16solutions.com

Thanks, and good luck.

Best,

Jason Simmons
SVP, K16 Solutions

[RecycledElectro · Accepted solution]

Assuming you are a teacher, this is easy. Students can not download copies of old courses.

Your old Canvas courses might be there, under "Courses" (on the right) then under "All Courses" (at the top of the pop-up menu that appears.) Most schools never get rid of old courses.

If your old courses really do go away, you can archive them before they disappear. Go under "Settings" (it's at the bottom of the text menu on the left) then select "Export Course Content" from the text menu on the right. At the bottom of the screen click on the button that says "Create Export," and wait as the status bar crawls across the screen. Finally, click on the new blue link to download the new export.

Be careful, Canvas will not allow imports of courses over 500 MB! I lost a huge collection of content when my export was 517 MB. I am still smarting from that, years later.