Canvas Archiving Webinar Recording

Alright. Well, thank you all so much for joining us today. We are here to to discuss and introduce Canvas archiving. Where you'll learn how to back up your courses, reduce clutter, and secure your data, and we'll specifically be spotlighting Seminole State College of Florida. Christopher Downs, I am the director of government affairs and strategic alliances here at instructure, and one of our most strategic partnerships is our partnership with k sixteen solutions. And as many of you know, and many of you are aware of k sixteen solutions for some of their other services that we partner with them in the market in, whether it be Well, for example, migration services.

But over the last few months, instructure has been rolling out a collaborative partnership with k sixteen to help our client institutions do a few things. And included in that is improving and maintaining their LMS hygiene, purging historical courses, usually five years older or more and adhering to institution institutional data retention and student data policies, both within the schools that they that themselves, but also as states start to look at, responsible stewardship of student data, both from a security standpoint, but also from a continuity standpoint, back into time. And today, we'll be highlighting the story of, Seminole State College, Florida, and we're joined by Sam Kelly from their team. Who'll be sharing with us, their journey exploring solutions to archive their data and ultimately landing on Canvas archiving powered by k sixteen and what that looked like, and lessons learned along the way in that process. But but first before we jump into all of that, we're gonna set the table a bit, and discuss archiving.

What is it? Why has it become a mission critical process for institutions over the last few years. And then we'll move into a discussion from the lens of the institution, an institution that was faced with making a decision on archiving, and why Canvas archiving was the best fit. So to do so, I am pleased to be joined by Sam Kelly from Seminole State University. I am pleased to be joined by Sammy Bugby from k sixteen Solutions. And also, our very own Andrea Davis who will help facilitate the conversation today from our strategic account team here at instructure.

So panelists, if you might, could you please introduce yourselves? Sam and Gubi from k sixteen will start with you and, introduce yourself to the folks joining us today. Thanks, Chris, and thanks for having us here today. My name is Sam Yagumi. I am, the SVP of partnerships at k sixteen solutions I'm happy to be here and go through what the solution looks like today. Sam Kelly.

I'm Sam Kelly. So I'm from Seminole State College, and I am the LMS admin. At Seminole State College, and I'm also happy to be here. Thank you guys. And thank you, Chris, so much for kicking things off for us today.

I appreciate that. And hello everyone. My name is Andrea Davis, and as Chris mentioned, I'm one of the strategic account managers on the higher ed team here at Instructure. And so for the remainder of the webinar, I'm gonna help moderate the discussion specifically with k sixteen in seminal state. So please feel free to post questions in the chat.

We have a couple other team members who are gonna be helping us moderate the chat and obviously we'll take a, you know, a pause when appropriate to address those. But then we've also saved some time at the end to open it up for questions. As well. So let's get started with, Sandy Goobie. Sam, you again for being here today.

And before we get into the product demonstration portion, I was hoping you can maybe just kind of help us set the stage on archiving. You know, why has this become a thing? Why is this something that our higher ed institutions and K twelve schools are doing present day? Definitely. And, you know, over the past several years, we've been hearing more and more about the need to archive as we see, more and more schools have been on Canvas for a long period of time. They're seeing an increased amount of content sitting on their platforms. There are multiple reasons that I've heard about why somebody needs to archive, but really primary ones come down to one securing their student data We're hearing from institutions that there are different policies related to how long student data, you know, courses can really sit out there open on the LMS.

Right? The other part of it is really cleaning up the environment. After you've been on the platform for, you know, four, five, six years, as most of the schools are on here will will attest to. It starts to have a lot of courses out there that you have to sift through every time you want to do something. And, you know, the third piece that I see quite a bit, it's really about institutional and governmental policy, you know, ferpa, GDPR, stated data retention policies, PI, PII. Lots of different factors that lead to the need to really secure that content off-site.

Secure it somewhere where there's limited access to it. This platform is really designed for admin access only. Others can get in as admins allow them to, but it's meant as an admin platform. So essentially, we've given school's ability to take that content off of the Canvas environment, move it to an integrated platform. So It's not being tucked away in cold storage somewhere where it's difficult to access.

It's being moved into a different environment with its own UI that It's integrated with their Canvas environment, which means it's really easy to access the content when needed. It's really easy to push courses back into the Canvas environment when they need to. And we'll demonstrate all this in a little bit. We'll go through and show how all that works. But it's really easy to use and really easy to set up.

That's perfect. Thank you so much for that. I think that just kinda helps start with, initial you know, high level definition of, what we're gonna be talking about today. And I think this is a really good time, to maybe kick it over to you, Sam, and take a through a demonstration of what Canvas Parkiving looks like. I know that's usually one of the first things that people are thinking about, in this discussion.

I can definitely do that. And as I said, a lot of a lot of times when I meet with different schools, their vision, their, their expectation for an archive is a whole bunch of files tucked away somewhere, on a hard drive or in the cloud somewhere. It's really difficult to access. That's why in coordination, the within structure, we built this platform that really changes the approach. So let me share my screen.

Only ticket. And Find the proper screen here. Sorry, everybody. Now you should be able to see, my the Canvas archive environment. This is a copy of seminal states data.

Don't worry, everybody. It's on anonymized. So you might see the same names repeated over and over again, but we pulled down a few terms from seminal state and moved into the archive here. The process of actually setting it up is really easy. We use a, admin user account and the direct URL to your Canvas instance, and that's it.

That's all the school needs to do is set up those two. Have those two items ready. And there's a wizard that walks the user through. And within about ten minutes, your archive environment is set up and ready to use. Once you go into the archive, you can go in and just simply grab the terms that you are expecting to use.

Now multiple ways to pull these courses in. As I said, the main approach is to do it by term, and that's what I'll demonstrate here. You would simply go in And for Seminal, we've pulled in the twenty fifteen courses, but pulling in additional terms is really as simple as go in. Find the terms that you want. Let's say the summer twenty three courses and hit save and import it'll ingest those courses right in.

Now we're not going to actually import anything right now because those wouldn't be randomized, and Sam Kelly wouldn't be too happy about that here. So we'll leave that as it is right now. So once your courses and your terms are pulled in, it's really easy to go in and take a look at the content right here. So the approach typically is once again, admin user platform. If somebody needs content from an old course, they can ask an admin to go and grab it.

And, you know, if somebody can go in here and search very easily, if I could spell geometry, could find the geometry course, can go in and you'll see that all the details are here. The enrollments from everybody who was enrolled at any point are captured. Full grade book is captured. You can scroll across all the various grades. For students, you can drill down into any one of these see the details, the time stamps.

If there were any file attachments, they would be here as well, feedback. Everything is captured very easy to use. Now if I wanted to utilize this data, it's really easy. I can actually run export this data in multiple ways, a raw CSV submission files. I can actually pull, submission files specific by students, discussion posts by students.

So I'm trying to say here, once again, it's not a it's it's not a cold storage, just a bunch of files stored similar. There's full interface here, really easy to use. You can run reports out of this environment and really get better access to your data than you normally would have. So what we we've seen here so far is the student submission data. Now the all the course information is here as well.

All your pages, your discussions, your assignments, everything has been captured. Now if you a user needed this course information back in Canvas, really easy to do. There are two options. You can either restore the course, which means it would push the course level information back into the prior shell, same SIS ID, or you could sync to LMS, which means it creates a brand new shell brand new course for you to use. So multiple options, multiple approaches there.

Some great search capabilities here, you can go and search for Bill Taylor. There are a lot of Bill Taylor's because once again, this is all in the itemized data. But if you go in, I searched for a student. I looked and I can see all the different courses that student was enrolled in. I can drill down further and see more details.

You could do the same thing for faculty, for, TAs, anybody who was enrolled in the course for any reason is all captured here. K. That's a a quick overview of how the platform works, unlimited number of users can be attached, keep in mind it as an admin platform. So we like to really keep that down to a few key people who manage your platform. So there we are.

Thank you. You know, you touched on this briefly, but maybe while you're on this page, can you just explain a little bit further and help us differentiate between canvas archiving and cold storage. And and why is that significant? Definitely. I mean, cold storage has always been out there as a as an option or at least the people who believed it was an option. In reality, when you try to use cold storage, what most people don't realize is that the files you're extracting out of the canvas environment don't actually have all the data you would want.

So you're what you're storing essentially would be the, the course itself. You're not even getting the student data, which is essentially what you need to store, for future use. Right? So, that's one aspect of what doesn't get captured when you use source. The other part, of course, is what I've just went through here, and that's the UI, the interface, the ability to actually access, utilize, and work with the data, and the ability to push it back into environment when you when you need to use it for something. Nobody wants to delete courses.

Nobody wants to delete data. Right? Because a lot of faculty do reuse content, and they might reuse courses from last year. They might use it from four years ago, five years ago, eight years ago. Institutions that I work with want to store and retain this data. They don't want the data to be out there and be accessible by everybody.

So that's really what this gives you. That's the difference. This is something that you can use versus something you've tucked away in a folder somewhere, which nobody will ever see again. Love it. Thank you.

That that definitely helps provide some clarity. And then my last question here, before we could get over to Sam Kelly. Yeah. If you had to share a few reasons why Canvas archiving is the best path forward for our institutions to, you know, approach their data retention policy what would that be? You know, the the big the the big piece is that it's safe, it's secure. It's all stored on AWS.

It's encrypted at rest. It's encrypted in flight. It's a very secure means of moving your data around and that as we all know is incredibly important these days, making sure that nobody is accessing this data who shouldn't have access to it. Second is what we just looked at, the the user interface versus something tucked away in cold storage somewhere. The ability to really work with the data And third, let's say it's that integration.

It's the ability to run reports, push data back into the Canvas environment when needed. Once again, It's access to data. It's not just throwing it away or tucking it away. Got it. Well, thank you.

I appreciate it, Sam. That was really, really helpful. Thank you so much. Let's see. Any let's take a let's take a pause.

How is the chat looking? Do we have any questions that this might be a good time to address for Sam. Let's see. I'm gonna start scrolling up here. We do have one question Sam from it looks like Don Ray. If you restored the course, do the students come with it? Now, restored course will only have the course level data.

The whole idea is to secure the student data and the student enrollments in the archive. So, all of that can be accessed through the archive interface everything else from the course level can be pushed into canvas when needed. Got it. Okay. Thank you for that.

And then we have one from McLaren. Can you restore to any environment or only to the original environment? You can just really restore to any environment. It really just depends on where you point your integration. So multiple multiple options there. Okay.

And then we have one from Phil. If at the end, Okay. I'm not quite sure if that was a question, for everyone or for the panelists. So, Phil, maybe can you help us rephrase that question a little bit? I'm not quite sure. You can you could give me a start position to utility.

Thanks. Okay. We can address that one later. So, I think that is it. We are caught up on the questions for now.

Let's shift over to Sam Kelly. And, unpack seminal state journey and experience with Canvas archiving so far. So, hi, Sam. Thank you so much. I thought we're doing really well.

Thank you so, thank you again for being here. I just to kind of start us off, you know, as we think about other institutions who've touched on this call today, right, who are navigating this space right now. Could, can you share some background on how some middle states started down this path, right? Like, started down the process. What was the impetus for looking at archiving solution specifically at your institution? Sure. So I started at Semital State in May twenty twenty two.

And so when I came in, looking at our Canvas environment, Central State moved to Canvas in twenty fifteen. And they had done no process for cleaning up kind of courses. So we hide courses from the old LMS, and we have, probably about five or six terms a semester. So we had a bunch of courses close to, you know, forty thousand courses right now. So one of the problems we were having was just, a lot of slowness, a lot of kind of, course, a lot of courses for faculty to kind of sort through.

So we wanted to try and find a solution for that. But we also wanted to make sure that we were within our retention policies for the state of Florida. So That's when we started having those kind of conversations. Should we look at something like an archive, and how do we maintain our legal standpoint for retention. Okay.

That that helps. Thank you so much. Were there any alternative solutions that you guys evaluated. And and if so could you speak to, you know, how you ultimately arrived at Canvas archiving as the best fit for Sentinel State? Sure. So we were looking at, originally we looked at doing something in house, kind of trying to store everything, locally, you know, generate a server for it and keep everything within seminal state.

But we don't have the the manpower to be able to do that. And we didn't really have the resources to be able to create something that would be secure enough for our liking. So when we started looking to see if there was gonna be another solution, we found k sixteen pre quickly right away and it met all of the needs that we wanted with Canvas archiving. Got it. Do you have any advice or guidance for schools who are looking into data management and retention solutions? Yeah.

I would say the the first big step is really, like, we spent a lot of time talking to legal a lot of time talking to Dean's, and, stakeholders at the college to make sure that anything that we found, or anything that we did was going to meet the needs of everyone. So I would say first approach, really hash everything out with legal, make sure you're within you know, reason and within the time frame for your retentions. And making sure that across the board, everyone knows what's going to be happening. It is a bit of a shift for faculty, for staff. So just making sure it's very clear communications, and letting everyone know what the policy looks like.

That's good to know. Yeah. I've you know, as I continue to have conversations about this with, specifically, you know, the higher grade schools that I work with. You know, it's interesting to see, like, you know, what stage people are in with evaluating this, right? Is it legislation that's driving this decision and policy, to make a decision kind of quickly or is this you know, forward thinking or, you know, in a couple years, are we gonna, you know, need to put something in place to be able to have a solution like this that we can easily access? So, I appreciate you you taking some time to walk us through that. And then I do have another question and I think this is probably on everybody's mind because, as an account manager.

This always routinely comes up, but can you speak to the implementation process of Canvas archiving Was it labor intensive or time consuming, on your end and in a heavy lift for some of the state? Not at all. Honestly, it was a super easy transition for us. The the biggest lift was just communicating it with the stakeholders and faculty and letting them know that this was coming. But actually implementing the Canvas archive was a very easy task for us. Like I said, I mentioned, it was just creating an admin account, and then giving at them the URL to our instance of Canvas.

So the actual lift of it was not hard. And then the system itself is very easy to use. I think we had maybe ten minute call with, k sixteen to kinda go over everything. And our whole team was able to pick it up very quickly. So even, you know, if you're not the most tech savvy or you're not the LMS admin, it's a very easy tool to use.

Oh, thank you for that, and Sam Yagumi props to you guys over at Kate's team for making this a an easy lift for our schools. We've appreciate your helping me with this. Thanks, Sandra. And if I can add, actually, since Sam Kelly had, set it up, we've actually even advanced since then, Sam, we've added a wizard which, now schools don't even need to give us anything. It's self-service.

It literally takes ten minutes. And they're up and running on their own. So very, very easy to use. Awesome. Awesome.

Okay. So We have this implemented at Seminole State. How are things going today? Are you, you know, seeing any benefits, as a result? Implementing a Canvas archiving solution. And and if so, would you mind sharing a couple of those? Yeah. So, we have all of our terms moved over already.

So everything's in the archive. As it stands currently, we still have, everyone has access to everything inside of our actual production canvas instance, just so that You know, we could have a smooth transition. No one is actually losing any data or anything like that. But we've set everything up. We've set up who's the admins to be able to access Canvas archiving.

And it's going pretty smooth. We haven't had any kind of issues. Everyone that we've talked to on campus is happy with our process and happy with our plans moving forward with everything. So and we're in line with our retention policies as well. So Yeah.

We couldn't be happier with it honestly. Thank you. That's wonderful to hear. Well, thank you so much, Sam. I'm gonna jump into, the questions again now that we've kind of, you know, wrapped up our discussion with Sam Kelly.

So leaving off I see Phil Collins. He had a question. Where is the archiving stored? Will this require the customer to increase any data environment? I can answer that one. We follow a very similar footprint as, instructions of the Canvas product. So everything is on AWS.

There's nothing that the school needs to do. We take care of all of it. So there is no increase in any data environment. All stored on AWS. Fantastic.

And that is k sixteen's AWS accounts that we store all that in. Got it. Okay. Thank you. And then, this one I believe is for Sam Kelly.

Claire asked what other archiving solutions did you consider and what made k sixteen stand out? So, like, like I kinda said, we were really looking, between k sixteen and, like, an in house solution. Nothing else we kind of did research on even came close to meeting one or two of the standards that we needed. So a big reason why we went with k sixteen was one, it hit everything that we were looking for. But two, the kind of partnership with Instructure, was a a big win for us. We wanted we already work with Canvas and Instructure.

So having something that is partnered with Canvas and Instructure was is was big for us. We knew that if instructure was saying, yes, this is a tool that we like. We're partnering with that we could trust it. Everything looks similar to Canvas even. So that was a really nice, kind of transition and help the transition as well.

So that was one of the big reasons why we went with k sixteen. Got it. Thank you, Sam. Okay, this one will be for K sixteen. This is from Don.

In the process of the archive, does it delete the course of the courses from Canvas or does it leave the originals in place? The originals are left in place until the institution submits, submits a CSV to have those deleted. So once we archive we generate a CSV file of everything that's actually in the archive physically, and then you can take that and have everything deleted out of your Canvas environment. That's just that's the layer of security to add some a human touch in that process to make sure that nothing gets deleted until we've confirmed that's actually in the archive. Makes sense. Thank you.

I can also kind of chop on that process as well just as the other piece of, you know, app, like, requesting the deletion. So we submit just a a ticket to, instructure and that goes to the engineers, and we just send them everything that we want kind of removed. And that also is a very easy process. So on both ends, a very easy time and shift. Thank you.

Alright. We have a three part question from Ruby. Are the servers managed and maintained by k sixteen orange structure? I think you kinda touched on this, Sam? That's right. Everything is on AWS. And that is k sixteen's AWS.

We are maintaining those, but just to add, k sixteen has been awarded stock two type one and stock two type two, I believe, is any second now. That's just a timing piece. And ISO, twenty seven thousand one was also just awarded as well. So as secure as secure can be, we take security very seriously at k sixteen. As does that structure in Canvas.

So we stay aligned. And this was also pointed out since there seems to be some co ending with our contract to be with Instructure or with K sixteen. We work with, K sixteen to deliver the pricing model on paper. Is that correct, Sam? That's correct. Everything is contracted directly through instructure and on instructor paper.

So it's actually the easiest thing to add this on. It it's just a a just a page is sent over a work order that you sign off on, and it I've seen this process go through in a day. So pretty quick. Perfect. And then I did have a couple of questions here that said, you know, we'll be discussing pricing at point during this call.

No, we do not have pricing prepared today. If you do have questions, you know, we're encouraging you to reach out to your CSM or your AE, and they can give you the specifics, you know, relating to how many courses you are interested in archiving so forth. And then Don asked, would the instructors of the archive courses be able to access the archive courses or just the admin? You know, that is completely up to the institution. The way it's designed is to be for an admin user, platform. But you could create a faculty user and and give faculty access to specific courses as well.

So that's completely up to you. By design. It's an admin platform though, and that's how I would recommend using it. Got it. In Sam Y, there's, question coming in from Movie.

It I think it's pertaining more to some admin settings. I'm gonna go ahead and read this. What was that? I I can answer that part. Oh, great. Great.

As a Ruby, you asked about, the permissions the easiest approach is to set up an admin user, account. And where this goes through the wizard, so you're setting it up yourself. Within the tool. But we do have a a revised list of permissions that could be set up as well if you're not comfortable giving that role full system admin completely up to you. And we can share that on a case by case as needed.

Alright. Thank you. And then another I think the last question I am seeing is coming from Kingsley, is archiving required we switched from Blackboard to Canvas, we were told archiving was not necessary, which was a big plus for Canvas. Kingsley, that is a great question. No.

As of today, it is not required. We are just seeing this come up a lot more. Like Sam mentioned, even in the state of Florida, I get a lot of questions about this as it pertains to legislation that's, you know, has been passed or in the process of being passed. With, with, you know, student data retention laws. So, you know, this is something we would kind of wanted to get ahead of.

We wanted to make sure our schools knew that this was an option. If this is something that is currently being considered. You know, again, just given the the intake and of of questions that that we're getting from our schools. Okay. And then let's see.

Anything I missed here. Another question, does restoring a course restore the course ID as well, or does it create create it as though it is a new canvas course? Completely up to you, you have both options, actually. Depending on whether you use the, the restore functionality or the push the LMS functionality. You wanna restore, uses a prior ID, and the other one creates a new shell in your course. We're trying to give you as many options as possible because we've heard so many different use cases for this.

Yep. And and I'll add as we go, this platform is ever evolving. So as more and more institutions come on board and more and more requests come in, we have a we have a nice list of of features that we will continue to build and add to this. So I would love to have everyone as part of that family and adding adding a request and insight into what else would make this an even better platform. Thank you.

Well, thank you. I think that is it. I don't see any other questions that have come in oh, nope. Phil fill head one more. Okay.

Good. Bill is asking is the archiving live? I'm not exactly sure. Phil, if I may go ahead and answer this correctly for you, but it is a live database. It is live archiving. You can grab your terms at any point and ingest them into your archive and you could push back at any time.

So, so, yes, it's live. I hope that answered your question. It does. Thank you, Sam. Okay.

Well, thank you all so much for joining. And thank you. A huge thank you again to K sixteen in Seminole State for participating in this webinar. Again, this is something that we we were trying to to put together before the holidays, you know, just given the intake and volume of questions that we were getting from our school. So I really appreciate your time today in in being here.

We hope this was meaningful and informative discussion for our attendees. We will be sending out resources and more information to all the registrants, in part of our, as part of our follow-up email. But we also have a link included here that can you to our Canvas archiving landing page. And as always, if you do have any additional questions, as I kind of mentioned a little bit earlier, they want to continue the conversation, please feel free to reach out to your CSM or your AE as a next step. Thank you again.

And we really appreciate you being here, and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day and the rest of your week. Thanks, Sam Kelly, and thank you. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Bye, everyone.