Why do I need a Canvas development shell?

Dear Aggie,

 

I was recently asked about my Canvas development shell, and I have to confess that I have no idea what this is. Do I have one? What should I be doing with it? I can barely manage my regular courses!

 

~Missing something

 

Dear Missing,

 

Not to worry! You may not have a development shell, but you may discover that you actually want one. A Canvas development shell (often referred to as a “sandbox”) is a Canvas course shell that is never available to students. So then you might wonder what good that is. There are (at least) four reasons that you may want to have a development shell.

 

1. Develop a course

As you probably know, our Canvas course shells are not made available until about 30 days before the start of the semester. This may not feel like enough time to build your course before you have to start teaching. Enter the development shell. You can request a “blank slate” development shell to pre-build your course. You can publish quizzes and assignments to check them out, without worrying that students will be able to get into them and take them (because students are never in your development course).

 

Anything that you build in your development course can be imported into your “actual” (“live” course) shell when it becomes available (by “pulling” content from your development course into the actual course).  

 

2. Invite reviewers

As you know, “evidence from other professionals” (peer course reviews) is one of the forms of evidence of teaching effectiveness that we can submit with our Annual Performance Reports. If you would like to have a colleague review your course, you may want to have them review it in your development shell, rather than the live course. This can be particularly useful if you want feedback on your design. In the development shell, they can get a very good look at your design, without having access to students/student work. They will also not receive all the communications associated with your live course, which may reduce their notifications from Canvas.

 

3. Play with new ideas and test settings

Because your development shell never has students, you can use it as a space to “play” with settings or assignments or quizzes, again, without worrying that students will somehow make it into a “test” environment. Yours truly has used it to play with the automated feedback in quizzes, to try out various types of submissions allowed for an assignment and to generate and view a “hyperlinked” syllabus on the syllabus page. One thing to keep in mind is that the Student View doesn’t always perfectly mimic the student experience (in both development shells and actual courses), so if something does not appear to be behaving as expected, pop into the Academic Technology Open Lab. They can help you determine if what you are experiencing is really the tool, or due to the imperfect nature of the Student View.

 

4. Back-up a course and make modifications

While you have access to your closed Canvas courses for 2 years and 1 week after the course is completed, you may want to start modifying that course sooner rather than later (while all your great ideas are fresh in your mind at the end of the semester). You can copy a completed course into a development shell, then start to make modifications in that development shell, so it will be ready to pull into the live course the next time you teach it.

 

How to request a Development Shell

Use this link:

https://learning.nmsu.edu/request-forms/development-course-request-form/

You can request as many development shells as you need/want. You may want one for each course, and a general “sandbox” to play with new ideas.

I hope that this helps give you some ideas about development shells and how you might find them useful.

 

~Aggie