Most Unconventional Use of Canvas

[FSUKevinKennedy]

Hello everyone, and happy summer!

I was recently talking with some colleagues about some non-standard uses of Canvas at their universities, from departmental testing to first-year readiness programs. I'm curious: what's the most unconventional way you (or someone you know) has used Canvas in higher education? 

[John__Lane]

Probably not all that unconventional but we're opening up a Canvas 'course' for our HR group to be publicly visible.   Their modules will cover all the onboarding necessary for new employees without any need for login credentials.  (not sure why a web page wouldn't work but here we are. )  This will be up, shortly.  

We have peer mentor services where we enroll FTIC and transfer students (separate courses) where these different cohort of students can login to get resources and arrange for tutoring, advising, and basic needs help, etc.

We have continued ed classes and a police academy using Canvas but because their semester cycles are vastly different we are using a different enrollment tool that also takes care of billing and is completely run by their respective departments.

In a previous LMS faculty were using courses as a method for Rank and Tenure processing.   They had templates of different folders that candidates uploaded their previous scholarly work.   That said, we moved that over to TEAMS but the word on the street is they are going to move this to a proper enterprise software application, shortly.

Hope this is helpful.

[cms_hickss]

We have a couple, but probably the best example is, we have two similar courses that have no content in them, the only tool enabled is Announcements and the homepage is set to a single page with a brief explanation. The courses are used as alerts to remind student of something important (say, fall registration or drop for non-payment). The students are enrolled (though CSV, so they can't decline) and then as they take action are removed from the course by daily CSV files. The course is then "reset" between uses.

The course announcements (not daily) are used to alert students that they need to take an action. It also means that a course card shows up on the student's dashboard which works as a secondary reminder.