To Trust or not To Trust, That is the Canvas Question: A California Community College Case Study

I'm Cynthia Norman. And we got people in front who are probably gonna get overwhelmed and people in back. Okay. So then maybe I won't project quite so much. I've been known to, like, talk to the back row of a theater and stuff like that. So, the mic I know isn't necessarily for you guys to hear.

But, I'm Tim Van Norman, and I wanna talk to you today about the Canvas trust. So imagine with me a world where you've got multiple schools in an environment. Each one wants to do things their own way, right? Their admins, their faculty. Faculty really want this tool, but administration for the whole the whole department, the whole University, the whole whatever it is, district in our case, doesn't wanna pay for everybody to have it, only for this one school to have it. Okay? That school's gonna now pay for it.

Or what if the schools don't trust each other? Alright. What do I mean by that? Well, I know that the administration from that school is going to look at my class. Alright. Every single one of these things I just mentioned, I went through and I had gone through for the last three for three years. Until a year ago when we implemented the Canvas trust.

And the fun part of this was I was working on how to do some of this stuff and the other school said, we really wanna leave you. Thank you. Let's do it. Alright. So Canvas trust.

Canvas trust is a relationship between Canvas instances. Alright. Lots of different ways to do this. I'm gonna go over some theory, a little bit of theory. Feel free to ask questions.

I will be repeating them or trying to repeat them. But, this is about two, three, four, however many entities, being able to work together, but yet still be separate. So what do I mean by that? You can share users. So we literally have faculty teaching at two different colleges. Every user, except administrators, logs into one instance of canvas, no matter where they're teaching, That said, the way we've set it up is every user is taking classes or teaching classes in two different instances, not in the instance they log into.

Now, I'm gonna use that term instance over and over again. Basically, you can when if you're familiar with database diagrams, you're gonna see database symbols up on here. Think of it as a database. It's an instance more technical term, if you talk to Canvas, they're gonna know what you're talking about when you say instance, and it works really well. So this creates an ability for people to have a home college, a home location.

Okay? And then to take classes in other locations. So students log in at the home location and then they access the teaching college. So we have, somebody who just did presentation and mentioned something, a downside to this trusting relationship just a little bit ago. So in California, we have something called the CBC, California Virtual College. CBC has set up a big trust relationship with all of the community colleges and working on finishing off the full trust relationship with some of them, including us.

We just a month ago went live. With the different colleges, so that means that an Irvine Valley College student, a student that that is at the college that I work at can take a class, an online class at Madara College, which is in Northern California. They through this whole organization, they log into our instance of Canvas, and they see their writing class, and they see their math class, and they see their computer programming class, all on one instance. One of the cool things about it is when they click on that math class, it literally changes the URL. Now, if you're a canvas admin, that statement actually is really meaningful.

Okay. If you don't understand the meaning behind that, Think Proctorio. Think any of the tools that are based on your URL. Zoom might be. There's other things that are based on the URL that's at the top of the screen.

If that URL doesn't match what they know, I'm sorry. You don't have access to this application, this LTI. We had this problem before. Before we went to the trust, And so this allows that to not have an issue. And by the way, I don't have to set up in my my white list, every single possible URL for every single possible college and district and everything else.

Okay? So the reverse is now also true. A student at Medera College could take a computer programming class at IVC. So what does this look like? This is actually a dashboard that's my picture because that is my dashboard, in one of my instances. And, actually, it's a teaching dashboard. I'm an administrator.

So The first class, the blue bar to me indicates that this is coming through the trust. This is in my trust relationship, my instance of Canvas. I've actually created different color bars for different, instances of canvas. That way when somebody says, I'm having a problem and I look at their screen, I don't have to go try to find that tiny URL that flipped off screen. I know what it is just by looking at that.

So if you're ever gonna do this, create things for yourself that make your life easier. Alright. So the first one at the top is in my new instance. The second one at the top is through the California College's instance. The third one is as well.

The fourth one, the second or first one on the bottom, that's in my old instance. So, yes, I still have to the old courses and old stuff. So as a teacher, I can pull those in and use them. The next one is at our saddleback. College, a different college that's in the same district.

Okay? And then this one is a general one. This student hub is actually the same thing. We have a student hub that's available to all of our students automatically. They when they log into Canvas, they can on that, and they can see lots of tools that we have available and stuff like that. So what's the benefit of trusting? Well, at a larger organization, a state level, bigger level, students can log in literally in South Orange County, California, and take a class in Sacramento or wherever it is.

As long as it's online, kinda hard to commute. Students can access all the classes from one dashboard, and the communications And this is one of the key. When a teacher sends an announcement, it goes to the home college's email. So the student doesn't have to miss the announcements and miss somebody who's sending a message to them in the inbox, all of that stuff. It's all tied together.

Well, some of that helps as well at the district, but the big one for us was the independence. Okay? There's some stuff that I wanted to install. And rightfully so, our sister college didn't. Okay. They have the right to say no.

While there was stuff they wanted to install, and my faculty told me, don't you dare? Okay. I'm gonna I'm gonna say no to that one too. Now We're both in a situation where we want something. We can't have it because the other side, it's a fifty fifty. We both have to agree or it doesn't happen.

Users can change knowledge of record as well. So we created it in such a way because we were looking at the fact that our students sometimes multiple times a semester will go, oh, I'm gonna be an IVC student. Oh, I need to enroll in certain kinds of class So now I have to be a saddleback student and they will literally change their college of record. Well, if they're logging into our instances, that changes their email address, changes whatever it is, I can't have that happening and keep a consistent record for the student. So that was our goal.

We didn't want people to be losing information. Students and faculty can access our courses at all colleges at the same dashboard and can separate each college and have separate, and we even created separate district courses. So deciding to trust. Lots of different things that were on our yes, let's do this. Okay? But there's also some reasons not to.

I'm the type of person I don't ever believe a speaker who always gives me only the good. So I'm gonna give you some bad stuff. I wait until we get later and I tell you what the issues are and there's a couple of pages. Alright? So I'm gonna I'm not gonna sugarcoat this, although I completely agree with it and like it. And, we'll advise you to get it if it's right for you, but I'll also advise you not to if it's not.

So if your organizations are your organizations to not be codependent. What do I mean by that? If everything is integrated, it's gonna be harder to split it apart. Okay? Now, one of the nice things is if you start a part You can actually create an environment more easily that is a together, but keep your courses separate. So there's a different way. And by the way, I keep on doing this v thing.

You'll see in a moment how that works out. Actually, I'll do it upside down on here. But, if your users are not shared. So I talked to one district where every, every college has separate users. So a user who is taking classes in student taking classes in two different colleges has two different logins.

Okay? If that's the case, you might not want to do a trust. Now, you might want to do a trust and solve that them in a different way. But you you wanna evaluate that. Alright? Mobile. Fifty percent of our students use mobile at least once a semester.

And that was just at the end of the pandemic. I haven't seen the the results in the last couple of months. So if you're using mobile, when I get into the issues, you'll start seeing what I'm talking about where be careful. It's more about communication than it is about yes or no. You've gotta talk to them in under and what's going on.

The tools for seizures policies, if they're all the same for everybody, why bother? If you have, you know, the old saying, me against my brother, my brother and I against the world, that type of thing, then the trust relationship works well. If you're best buds or like in some cases, a district will have their instructional designers and technologists at a district level and not at the college level, for instance, then you might not need a trust. But just understand that that's one of the factors. And if, like I said, centralized administration of Canvas, We don't have our district. They literally have no clue what canvas is other than that thing that Tim wore on that, every time we try to do something, he causes a problem.

Okay? And if you're in that that's not a centralized administration of Canvas. Okay. When I said it over, I didn't have any blank slides. So Alright. So what did we do? We created this is the actual setup that we've got right now.

So, CBC, California virtual college to South Orange County Community College District, and then Irvine Valley College and Saddleback College, and we actually do have a trust relationship across between them as well. Didn't have to do that, but when as we were setting things up, we felt that that was a good thing to do. Why? Because we have administrators on each side. One of the factors, one of the negatives in doing this is the administrator has to have a login into every instance. The administrator permissions don't go across.

So if I'm logged into my Irvine Valley College District and I do that in Edge. And I'm logged into SOCCCD in Chrome. I don't have access to anything that's auto unless I log in separately to theirs or they have granted me access to a class or something like that. So That said, we created this the data relationships here. So if you're familiar with the CSV files for system port, you'll recognize all of these.

If you're not familiar with them, this is basically the way the data rolls out. So all of our users log in at our district level. One hundred percent. Okay? Administrative also log in at the college level, but that's a different issue. We do not allow anybody right now to log in at the college levels at the other instances.

So then at the colleges, we have the accounts. So what is accounts? Do you guys know what accounts is? Let me call it subaccounts. Does that help? Alright? So this is a a tree. Our tree looks completely different than saddlebacks. One reason why we wanted to separate.

Alright? Because now we've got it set up differently. I literally, when I had this opportunity, So think about this. You work at a job, you get everything set up, and now you have the opportunity after spending years doing something to rewrite the whole thing all at one time. I was in heaven. Okay? Because I went through and I sat down with everybody.

What mistakes did we make? Now that we've been in this, What did we do wrong? Let's fix it. We have one opportunity. Okay. So our accounts, I thought we were gonna get rid of subaccounts. I cut it down to maybe three levels.

We added two levels because I went and I talked to somebody in our office of instruction and they're like, oh, if you do this and this and this, then we can now roll it out and use it in another environment. Like, your call. To me, it's one upload, and it's not a big deal. But it made life easier for somebody else. And that was the time to do it when I'm creating brand new from scratch, all empty.

Terms, what term are you in? Okay? Saddleback has the same terms for the most part, but they have a couple of others that they use that I don't want to have to through their other ones because I literally have spring summer fall. That's it. And they've got like three others. Okay. Fine for them, but it's really nice not to have to look at that.

Courses, sections, and enrollments. So you notice no users on the lower ones, and no courses or enrollment. On the other one, on the top one. It allows for that flexibility that we were talking about. We've had over fifty six thousand users go through that.

And this since May two thousand or twenty two, so in a year, we have actually had over three hundred and fifty thousand This number this number went up because I had to I had to submit this a month ago, and then I repulled the numbers and went, oh, man. So, yes, three hundred and fifty were pushing five hundred thousand enrollments for between what we're looking at for the fall and then in spring. So that conversely the state has the CBC has had three, almost four thousand people, I think, total over the last four years or something like that. And they have a maximum of two enrollments a year that they're allowed through theirs. So what does that mean? That means that when it came to trouble, we were going, Hey, we've got this problem and the state was going, oh, we haven't heard of that.

So part of what we'll get into in a minute. So here are the issues, some of the issues. So mobile, I talked about that. To do calendar and feedback, don't go properly across mobile. They have to actually log in to the to the instance, but it's a weird login thing.

LTI is not all on LTI's get this. In one of the cases, LTI has been working great. All the summer, all the sudden this summer, it broke because Canvas' user ID that they put at the top in the URL. I've seen some so that means people actually know what I'm talking about. Good.

I don't need to explain it. It's, you know, the next student number, right? When you import, they just give you the next number that's available. Well, now it turns into, I think it's a sixteen digit number. Because what it does is it prepends the location of the home college. So ours starts with six zero zero eight eight zeros and then the number, or however many zeros it gets to to get to the number.

Well, it happens to be if you ever get that list and you download it into Excel, Every last number becomes a zero. Well, that happens to vendors too. They haven't made the field quite big enough, but they something about it. I don't know exactly what, but we had two students taking the same test in the same class and our, our system, the proctoring system said, oh, this is the same student. And so this student, fortunately, you could see a picture of the student, and you're like, that's not the student.

That ID matched the other one. Okay? So it's sometimes weird things like that. So LTI's, and by the way, LTI's that require you to log in and then use something, where in the middle of one of those issues right now, they don't get it. And so you've gotta work with them and stuff like that. So it will it is a headache on specific cases, but things like this are helping me prove to them that they need to actually solve their problem.

Identifying which side of the trust has the issues. Okay? Going back to when I was talking about the state, it's really hard Okay. This student is having an issue. Is it because of the home college where they logged in or is it because of the teaching college and something weird was going on there? For us, it was a lot easier because I could see both sides. And I could impersonate the student on both sides and I can go, oh, okay, right there.

But I'm lucky. State doesn't have that option. Alright. Images. So sometimes when students upload images, stores in the home college's storage area.

Sometimes it stores in the course. If it stores in the home college, then the faculty can't see what's stored in the home college. Okay. And and it makes sense, right? But that's what the trust is supposed to eliminate is those types of issues. So, that's why the whole other side here at Canvas support.

Canvas support is great, but every time our faculty or students call Canvas support, faculty and students don't have any clue that they're going through a trust. And even if they did have a clue, They don't understand what is a trust issue and what's not. So a lot of times canva support will tell them something and I'll read through and I'll go all they have to do is click on this or type in this value in this other location. It'll automatically work. And but Canvas support, level one, understandably doesn't know that level.

Of what's going on. So there's a lot of times that that comes up. So they don't know what is trust related because they don't have enough history with that. They also don't know what calls are not trust related. And same thing it takes an administrator who gets used to it to figure out more and more of that.

And sometimes it I get it wrong. It's been a year and I'm I got one wrong last date. Students faculty don't understand. And then they don't understand the difference between a limitation and a bug. What do I mean by that? There are some things like the to do calendar and feedback.

To me, that's a bug that it doesn't work. Okay? Turns out it was a canvas design. Yes. I agree with the looks on your faces. Okay.

It was designed to I don't know that it was a design design or if it was a we're just not gonna deal with it design. Alright. But they didn't pass that through. They didn't do that. Now canvas is designed to pass to give the student that information.

To me, that's a bug. Okay? They're calling it oh, no. That's a limitation. That's a design flaw. So that's where the difference between a limitation and a design comes in.

So some transitional issues. We started with one instance and broke it into two. We did it a cross or we did it at the beginning of a summer on purpose. The reason is because We load this is my own thing, before spring break, I load all of the classes for summer and fall into our canvas. So all of the spring classes were already in, and I had from March until May to fix any issues.

I like that idea, right? Month after doing a year of testing by the way. But you know, there's always gonna be an issue when you something big like this. So we found out that Canvas Studio is not portable. Okay? What does that mean? Well, think about it this way. For your adjunct professors, they create a Canvas studio quiz They export their course and they take it to another college.

Alright. Guess what didn't come over? Any of the the two top two of those. None of the new quizzes and none of nothing happened to with Canvas Studio. They have to recreate completely all of that stuff. Off.

So I was fortunate. I had three people using Canvas studio. I just let him know that I'm sorry it doesn't work. Our sister college on the other hand had pushed campus studio really hard for a couple of years. And now they had to go to all of their faculty and say, I'm sorry, but you have to redo this.

Try to pay Canvas to make it work and it just they had to recreate a lot of stuff. That was incredibly painful. New quizzes, I had been telling everybody for three years, not to new use new quizzes. Okay? And so this became a there's I had probably ten or fifteen people who come my new quizzes didn't come over? Remember when I said not to? Remember when I said you can't copy new quizzes and take them someplace? Guess what? This is what happened. So it kind of became a you're out of luck.

I was I was fortunate I was able to do that. But if you've got a lot of people using new quizzes, that's something to be careful of. Logins How do our people logging in? Are they doing it properly? Where does the login occur? Stuff like that? You gotta make sure you document it. For us, we were really lucky. We didn't change a URL on either side.

We had five different URLs to log into the shared instance of Canvas before, we have five different URLs that can still log into that instance of Canvas right now. And the nice part is once they log in, they all have the same URL from there on. So I don't have to worry about that. Testing, we literally set up everything in test environments. We were driving canvas nuts because every month, they had to reestablish the trust in our test environment.

And we did everything constantly through test environments. I was really fortunate. I had a completely clean. I still have I've got two separate environments. I've got the one that we ran that says the IVC on there, then I have a completely different test test environment.

That I have kept spotless. It literally has two logins, maybe three right now. That's it. There's no courses. There's no anything on purpose.

Okay? I then went into the test environment on each of those, put all the trust, you know, had Canvas put all the trust relationships in and we tested that like crazy. Everything that we could do, we did. Lot and lot of thing. And we still had stuff come up that we hadn't realized. You have to determine what goes where.

You saw the diagram that we had. Where are your courses gonna go? That's where your enrollments are gonna go. How do sections work? All of that stuff, you gotta pay attention to as you're looking at your transition. You have to establish the trust, and then you actually have to trust the trust. Okay? And sometimes you're gonna have weird things happen that you gotta just back off and work through and maybe talk to somebody and go, okay.

How do I describe this? I have a white board that I still turn around and it's been wiped off for a year. But that I turn around, I'm like, okay, no, right here, and I with my with a software developer, and he can see the same thing I can on the white board because we went through it so many times that this white board still in minds has engraved on it our design. Okay? Why? Because we spent so much time reiterating testing designing before we actually implemented anything. And then you actually have to set up the new instances. So what do you need to know? Administration support, user access, administrative access, You gotta have multiple logins.

Okay? You are going to need to have fake student accounts for you as an administrator Why? Because you need to know in your head with one hundred percent certainty exactly what's gonna happen. Because somebody's gonna ask you and you're gonna go, I don't know. Let me check that out. Oh, this is what's gonna happen. Oh, I can log in with my iPad, but I need to do this to make that work right.

I wanna put somebody in a, put this fake student in a class so I can actually see what taking a test looks like. You're going to want to do that. And I know some places don't want you to do that. You're gonna need that for your own sanity sake. Multiple logins means multiple browsers.

So if I log into our main instance and I click on a class that's in the other instance, I've logged in with my administrative credentials. Now I'm a teacher. I don't have access to the other stuff. Well, now if I use that same browser and I try to log in to our my own instance, Now it doesn't work. Canvas blows up on me.

So I when I said before Edge is for my new instance, Chrome is for my old one. And I keep it that way. I keep it separate. I'm using incognito every day. I, you know, you do everything you can to in your own mind, have it separate.

Three screens is beautiful. I wish I could go six. But but I yes. I have three screens up, and so it's been really hard working at the hotel at night. On one going, is is that gonna be clear enough if I plug it into the TV? You know, so, but understand that it's really nice.

Something else to know mobile tokens are not disabled. That's something that's happening in your Canvas instance right now. What does that mean? Student says, oh, my account got hacked. What do you do? Change your password. Right? My account's still hacked.

No, it's not. We changed your password. You must have moved in your password out. Right? That's what we all think. I thought so too.

Until our webmaster and I started digging into what was going on. Some of the stuff that you were talking about before, some of the actual problems had nothing to do with the trust relationship. It had everything to do with the fact that we weren't killing off tokens. We had somebody who had logged in logged into Canvas in two thousand seventeen log in again in two thousand twenty and then twenty one. They hadn't been on campus they hadn't had a course.

They hadn't anything. But because somebody had an iPad or something like that that has a token, mobile app use a token to log in. The password, the password was no longer the account was no longer valid. In our system, but they were able to log in simply because they had that token. So Canvas has a way.

It's pretty simple on a single user way of doing it. You have to run that over and over and over again for all of your users. There is a way of killing all the tokens. So what we're literally doing is during winter break, we're killing all all the tokens every year because they have to log in with their new credentials. In order to do it.

If a student says, Hey, my account was hacked, we hit a button and part of that button changes the password and all that stuff and kills all of their tokens. Okay? So that's going on right now. We didn't know about it until we were in the middle of this transition. Okay. E portfolio.

One of the things that that Mike was talking about earlier today, what we found is that we had some students fake students that somehow we're getting into our system and they would create a an e portfolio for every one of the California community colleges. So a hundred and sixteen e portfolios all of a sudden show up. All of them saying click on me and I'll give you a test, you know, here's how you buy tests. Here's how you and I'm like, wait, it says IVC, and it's saying selling tests. This is a problem.

Alright? So we had to work with Canvas with the state with other people and learn about it. So what happens is the eportfolio location is actually at the home college. It's not although it looks like it, it's not at the teaching college. So when Mike was nice have to wipe out all of the the courses that we didn't need or all of the students that we didn't want, then We, all of a sudden, lost all of those issues. The ones that were coming from our college.

We're still there, and we could clean those up. But it we once you could learn that information. But what does that mean? That means that if a teacher is teaching a course and they say, we need an you need to create an e portfolio, and the home college doesn't allow e portfolios, That student can't do it. So you have to understand what those mean, and the student tries. They don't understand that's the case.

The teacher doesn't understand that's the case. Okay? So that's where having a really good relationship with your faculty is really key. They can ask questions, and now I know exactly what to go for. And I know where to look and I can dig into it and I can figure that out. I don't know off the top of my head.

I don't know who is a trust relationship student or not, other than the fact that all of ours are at least in one way a trust relationship. So that really helps. And by the way, that's what helped with a lot of troubleshooting. Every one of our students went came through the same way, that means this. So you have to tell Kiva support when you're calling about the trust.

You must be clear. And when level one says, oh, okay. I know what to do. Say, please document this. Because otherwise they will try to help because they're they're helpful.

Okay? They will try to help. They will not be able to. Okay? And then they'll have to have you repeat it to to document it because they're not documenting it as they're trying to try to help it. Typically, at least my thing. And then just be aware of the limitations that we talked about.

So here are the Canvas limitations. There's specific user roles and expectations. So if you get the presentation, I believe instructures providing the presentation for all of these, the slides and stuff. Go ahead and click on that. There's actually a document that keeps changing, which is why I didn't include the information here.

And that goes back to what I was talking about, bug versus limitation. That's in that document. Students, they cannot view the course of to do list items in the home college, they only view them when they're in the class and then go into, dashboard or something like that. The calendar, again, same type of thing going on, and then push notifications don't necessarily work the way you're expecting to as well. Instructors, kind of the same thing, calendar push notifications, account level outcomes become a little bit limited.

You gotta be careful with how you do outcomes. Not a big careful, just say be aware. You're dealing with a trust relationship. None of the stuff that that you had in the old instance came over properly for outcomes. And I'm saying that as a statement.

I'm not saying that as a question. None of the things that you did in outcomes came over properly. Okay? And the admin being able to view courses, you have to make sure you log into the proper one. So, thank you I'm Tim Van Norman. There's my email address, Tivan norman at I b c dot edu.

There actually is a podcast specifically on Canvas that myself and one of the, ESL faculty members from IVC did. We've got we've done four seasons of this podcast, the higher ed tech podcast. And the next episode should be dropping either next week or the week after. So, of course, we have to record it he just moved to Japan. So this is gonna be fun.

But they've added these slides So, in order to, make sure that you get credit for stopping in here, please, scan that and What questions do you have? So I guess I left eight minutes for questions. You ask how long I left for questions. But any questions, and feel free if you see me, you got my contact information, I'm more than happy to hop on zoom and explain, demonstrate whatever. If you do have questions, if you need to have your team talk over it, anything like that. Please let me know what I can do to help or explain.

I understand here too. Same that obesity might be is a touch up in both. When we were to trust that over, then the other one uses catalog So I've literally been sitting in a couple of sessions, especially the one on Canvas catalog, going, should I turn that other test instance into a training area? Exactly the question you're asking. Yes, the trust would work. What advantage that would be is that anything that would show up in the canvas dashboard would show up for them.

I don't know how it would work with catalog. And frankly, until you tried it, I don't think Canvas would know how that would work with catalog either. Okay? That's so I'm but you what you would do is you would have one main you'd choose a main instance. And then you would have link over and trust the other one and do everything through the trust. You'd never want to have somebody who is logging into both instances trying to go back and forth because it is two different users to Canvas.

Okay? So when I log in and I use my login and I'm in our shared instance, I'm user fifty one hundred. When I log in to the other instance, I'm user two. Okay? Canvas doesn't know that that's the same person. So that's that's the hard part is when you're taking stuff from an existing and you're doing two trust from two existing databases, that that becomes a little bit you gotta be more careful. Because you don't wanna lose stuff.

Now, merging users can become your friend. Because once you get them over, then but it's a manual process that I've seen work anyway. Then you can merge them together and then, yes, they can log in from either one. So does that help or did I just make it worse? I think it is. Now, the way you do that though is go back what I was saying, do it in the test instances.

Trust between the test instances. Try it back and forth, and it might be something that you you do it once and you go, oh yeah. This is easy. Or or, oh, this is horrible. I'm not touching it.

But do it with the test instance. Mike, Okay. And we've actually, have a number of our -- Okay. -- login or number that are coming across with. So for the recording, what I just said about I don't know somebody else does know, and yes, it would work.

That you could use canvas, canvas not credentials. Canvas catalog on one instance and not on the other do trust and it should work. So, any other questions? Alright. Well, thank you all for coming. Feel free to catch me if you see me and ask a question or whatever. I appreciate people being here. So thank you.