Seminole State Archives Courses Using New Canvas Archiving Solution

Founded in 1966, Seminole State College of Florida (SSCF) boasts high-quality educational programs, including bachelor's degrees, two-year college-credit degrees (A.A., A.S., A.A.S.), specialized career certificates, and continuing professional education. Since 1966, SSCF has expanded to four campuses within Seminole County, Florida. Today, the college serves over 30,000 students, both full and part-time

With such a large student population and over eight years on Canvas LMS, courses had begun to pile up. The college knew their Canvas LMS perfectly supported everything they needed in a Learning Management System (LMS). Still, they also knew they needed to find a way to organize all of that data better to make it easier for faculty and students to use appropriately.

That’s when Seminole State started to explore archiving solutions and ultimately landed on Canvas Archiving powered by K16 Solutions. This new Canvas LMS-integrated archiving platform backs up and secures aging course content and student data.

With over 40,000 courses to archive, most archiving solutions wouldn’t be able to move over this mass amount of data in a short period of time. Additionally, the typical archiving solution would require that the content be put in cold storage, making it incredibly difficult to access. Sometimes, students need access to an old submission or grade quickly, and cold storage would put a burden on staff to find and then translate that data. SSCF staff didn’t want to do a whole lot of heavy lifting to get data out of Canvas.

The number of courses piling up was starting to create a lag on SSCF’s system. Instructors were wasting considerable time sifting through historical data and waiting for information to load. This issue was becoming a massive workload burden that Seminole State was determined to offload from faculty so that they could focus on what they do best.

Administrators had started worrying about the number of users who had access to student submissions. Without an archiving solution, almost all submissions were completely accessible to anyone with admin permissions–even submissions from several years ago. SSCF needed a solution that could archive a large number of courses to remove this public access and put the data in a safe place where only the right users could touch it.

Seminole State believes that data can quickly turn from an asset to a liability if it is not managed appropriately. They needed a way to back up their course content and student data; it was through their monthly meetings with their Canvas rep that they began to discuss their archiving needs.

During one of these meetings, Instructure brought Sam Yaghoubi from K16 Solutions to demonstrate a superior archiving solution that fully integrated with Canvas LMS. Just one quick meeting with Yaghoubi, and the Seminole State team knew they needed to work with K16.

“Canvas Archiving powered by K16 Solutions was the only solution that was secure, robust enough for long-term, and seamlessly integrated with Canvas,” said Sam Kelly, Learning Management System and Senior Systems Administrator at Seminole State College. “No one else was doing all the things that K16 was doing.”

Once Seminole State officially chose to work with K16, the team moved quickly. With the help of Canvas Archiving, they were able to ingest all 40,000 courses with a click of a button. 

“It’s not often that you get a whole team that’s a third party and is as attentive and helpful as everyone with K16 has been,” said Kelly. “Our partnership with K16 is all you can ask for as an LMS admin. Everyone is helpful, quick to respond, and they genuinely care.”

Canvas Archiving provided SSCF with the secure hosting the college needed since this solution archives data away from anyone with just Canvas admin user permissions. As a result, it has allowed SSCF to meet accessibility requirements without having to update a bunch of old data. “Once an assignment is in the archive, we remove access from everyone,” said Kelly. “This tidies things up and allows us to control access to the data. After five years, we can do a soft delete and get rid of them.”

Seminole State was able to clean up its Canvas LMS and offload the faculty and staff burden of sifting through historical data. Loading times improved, and staff were able to focus on what they do best. “The integration of the new archive platform with Canvas LMS was seamless–it’s as easy as clicking a couple of buttons, and the data you need is integrated,” said Kelly.