Helping IT understand ID

[David_Dumonde]

I have worked as an instructional designer at several universities. Administration of Canvas falls under IT and for legitimate security reasons, IT places access restrictions on users. At every university I’ve worked up until now, I have been given wide admin access to the courses I develop, maintain, and manage. I now work at a university which has an extremely restrictive security policy, both at the school level and at the university level. 

At other universities I have been given admin access in Canvas to the sub accounts I work in, with a few reasonable restrictions. On a daily basis I expect to be able to search for any course by name or instructor, enter any course without the need to be added to it, create new empty coarse shells, copy courses and their content, view as student, act as student, and other broad permissions to assist faculty (and sometime students) with creating,developing, and troubleshooting our Canvas courses. Instead I find myself having to request access course by course, even resource by resource, in order to do very routine tasks. Often the request for access alone isn’t sufficient and email comes back with multiple questions asking me to justify my need for the access.

How do I help IT understand the role of ID and our need for flexibility access to be able to do my routine job in a prompt and efficient manner?

[chriscas]

Hi @David_Dumonde,

As a Canvas admin for our institution, I am primarily responsible for roles and permissions in our Canvas instance.  Even though I'm primarily responsible (and would be implementing things in Canvas), we still have a team of unit/college admins and a faculty committee which provide input on things like this.  I'm wondering if you're perhaps the first Instructional Designer at your university, or if there's an existing team there that's been used to working with the restrictions in place.  I'd share some of your frustrations personally, but I can also see things from the other side.  We do give our IDs an admin role, but have limited access to course creation and grades.  We currently let our IDs acs as users, but there have been recent discussions about removing that ability because it lets them see grade info, which we don't feel is necessarily within the IDs job description.

Every university has their own views of what is acceptable and not, but maybe you could start by keeping a brief log when you don't have the access you'd like, showing what the request was and how much extra time you had to spend requesting access and waiting for the request to be approved, etc...  I can't guarantee that would affect any changes, but usually leadership doesn't like to see a lot of time wasted on things like that so it might change their mind on how much access they'd be willing to give.  On the other hans, if they have a strict interpretation of FERPA (or whatever privacy laws might exist in your location) or perhaps want to draw a well-defined line between LMS support and instructional design, they may opt to leave things as-is well into the future.

-Chris

[David_Dumonde]

Hi @chriscas 

thank you for taking the time to reply. It is unclear to me how many schools or departments on our campus have instructional design support or how much the IT folks really understand about ID. I have already started a log like you suggested, and I’m trying to track how much interference this causes. Right now our actual active development is fairly light but I’ve got more than a dozen courses in the wings with no control of when they will start development. A year ago I was able to make a little progress by persuading them to create a separate sub sub account for course development comma, and give me a limited number of additional admin permissions within that account. That has helped for some of our development work, but we’re back in the same pickle as soon as we need to move the course to production or as soon as a professor says, “you’ll find that in my account from summer 2019.“ we have a similar problem with our video platform Panopto. For the first year I was here I was given admin level access, which allowed me to search for particular videos instructors had recorded. And a few months ago someone decided I should not have that level of access, and lower me to Creator Which only allows me to see videos that I have been given access to. Professors don’t know they need to give me access and even if they do they don’t know how. It’s an incredibly awkward situation. I’ve worked in higher Ed for over 20 years in a variety of academic, leadership and staff roles and can do FERPA in my sleep. I don’t usually have any reason to access student grades, but if a faculty member I’ve worked with to develop a course has a problem with the grade center, I’m the most likely person for them to reach out to, and I don’t think it’s good customer service to send him somewhere else. But in every institution I’ve worked at before I’ve had admin access that included grades just for that purpose.

thanks again for your reply.

[John_Lane]

Hi,

As others have mentioned, I understand both sides of the coin.   I am an admin and also report to IT but we also have a great working relationship with the provost.   When you have all your documentation and supporting information, I would work with your department head and IT and the Provost office and explain your bottle neck.  I'm sure once you can articulate your situation, there shouldn't be any reason why they wouldn't provide you with a role with more access.      

Best of luck.