Canvas Policies & Procedures

The following provides information on how Canvas is supported at Cal Poly Pomona:

Accessibility

Course Content

Material uploaded by Cal Poly Pomona faculty and staff is expected to fall within Section 508 compliance.

Learn about making common file types accessible at CAFE’s Creating Accessible Materials page.

Canvas Accessibility Resources

Canvas’s Accessibility Resources provides best practices, usage guidelines, and system features regarding accessible compliance.

Canvas Accounts and Access

Faculty Accounts

All Cal Poly Pomona faculty, staff, and students with a Cal Poly BroncoName and password are also granted Canvas accounts. This is the same username and password used to log into BroncoDirect and CPP email.

Faculty not currently teaching will be restricted from accessing Canvas. If access is needed, please email us at canvas@cpp.edu.

Faculty Leave Access

Canvas access may be disabled for faculty who are not teaching in the current term. Those wishing to regain access to Canvas must:

Ask their department to complete and submit paperwork for the following term and add them to BroncoDirect as the instructor for a future CPP course.

Student Course Access

Once a Canvas course has been published by the instructor, students may access the course five days before the official CPP term begins and will continue to have access to participate in the course until five days after grades are due. Approximately five days after grades are due, that term’s Canvas courses will automatically convert to a read-only state and will be removed from students’ Canvas dashboards. Students may continue to view these Canvas courses in this read-only state for the purpose of viewing past course grades and submissions unless the instructor adjusts the course settings to prevent view-only access.

Learn more about Section Start and End Dates.

Course Creation Services

Canvas Shells for Official CPP Courses

All courses offered through BroncoDirect are provided with a course shell in Canvas automatically. Course shells are created approximately 5 months before a term begins. New sections created in BroncoDirect within 5 months of the start of the term will be reflected in Canvas by the following morning.

Canvas Shells for Other Courses

CPP Canvas users may request Canvas shells for other purposes, such as:

Sandboxes in which instructors can prepare or store course materials, and manually enroll other users if they want; and
Organizations for groups or departments. These “unofficial” Canvas courses have all the functionality of other CPP Canvas courses, but they are created and enrolled manually. In certain cases, it may be possible to configure auto-enrollments for these courses based on Identity Management Group memberships or BroncoDirect course enrollments. Please email canvas@cpp.edu if you would like to consult about setting up auto-enrollments for your organization.

Course Enrollment Services

Automatic Course Enrollments

Faculty

Instructor access to official CPP course Canvas shells is controlled via BroncoDirect. If an instructor is already assigned in BroncoDirect when the course shell is created, they will receive access to the course shell as soon as it is created. For instructors added to BroncoDirect after the course shell has been created, they should receive access to the Canvas course within 12 hours of being assigned as the instructor in BroncoDirect. Teachers added to a course via BroncoDirect may only be removed from a course via BroncoDirect.

If one instructor is removed in BroncoDirect, and a new instructor is assigned to teach the course, the new instructor will inherit any content prepared by the previous instructor. For that reason, CAFE recommends prepping courses in a sandbox and copying them into the official course shell closer to the start of the semester.

For help saving content for a previously assigned instructor and resetting a course shell for the current instructor, please email canvas@cpp.edu.

Students

Students who have officially enrolled into courses using BroncoDirect will be automatically added to Canvas courses 5 days before the official start of the term for students (i.e., the first day of classes). Subsequent enrollment changes in BroncoDirect will be reflected in Canvas within 12 to 24 hours.
Students who drop a course after they have been added to the Canvas course will be marked as ‘inactive’ and will not be able to access the course.

Canvas Section Dates control whether students can participate in Canvas courses. The section opening date indicates when officially enrolled students will first be added to the Canvas course. Once enrolled in the Canvas course, students will not be able to view the course until it is Published by the instructor.

Approximately 5 days after grades are due, student Canvas enrollments will revert to a read-only state and students will no longer be able to submit work or otherwise interact through the Canvas shell. Students will still be able to view the course if the instructor has not restricted that access.

Automatic Enrollment Extensions

Canvas enrollments are configured such that students who receive an Incomplete or Report in Progress grade in a course will automatically be re-enrolled in a new section of the course after grades are submitted. This will allow them uninterrupted access to the Canvas course so they can submit remaining assignments. The section end dates will correspond to the Deadline for Completion established in the Incomplete Contract, or one calendar year after the assignment of the RP grade. Students with automatic enrollment extensions will lose the ability to participate in the Canvas course when their final grade is updated in BroncoDirect, or when the section end date is reached, whichever comes first.

Manual Course Enrollments

Instructors may manually enroll users who are not registered through BroncoDirect into their Canvas courses, including teaching assistants, other instructors, and sponsored affiliates.

Instructors may manually enroll a user with a CPP email address by following the instructions to manually enroll a user.

Note: Users with the “Student’ course role cannot be manually added or removed in official Canvas teaching courses. Students must add or drop through BroncoDirect to be added/removed in Canvas courses. Teachers may manually add other Teachers, TAs, Designers, Observers, or DRC staff to their official Canvas teaching courses. Teachers may choose to add waitlisted students as Observers to allow them to view the Canvas course while their official enrollment is pending, but they are not required to do so.

BroncoDirect Daily Sync and Annual Maintenance

Daily Sync

Course and enrollment changes are pushed from BroncoDirect to Canvas at least once per day. Certain information syncs up to four times per day. During the sync process, Canvas scans for discrepancies between the BroncoDirect feeds and the information already in Canvas, and updates Canvas as necessary to reflect the most current information from BroncoDirect.

If changes made in BroncoDirect are not reflected in Canvas within 24 hours, including student and instructor enrollment changes, please email canvas@cpp.edu and describe the issue in detail.

Annual Maintenance

Each year around July 15th there is a two-day rollover period when BroncoDirect feeds are paused. Changes made in BroncoDirect will not be pushed to Canvas until the after the pause.

At the conclusion of the pause, a fresh set of BroncoDirect feeds with the most current BroncoDirect data are uploaded to Canvas. Subsequent syncs resume the routine process of scanning for discrepancies between Canvas and the BroncoDirect feeds and updating Canvas to reflect the changes in BroncoDirect.

Combining Courses in Canvas

Automatic Course Combinations

Sections officially designated as “Combined Sections” in BroncoDirect will be combined in Canvas automatically. This may include:

CPP courses that have been approved for listing under more than one Department/Subject, but have the same course number, section number, instructor, and class meeting schedule (e.g., SOC 3313-01/EWS 3313-01);
CPP courses that have been approved for listing as different course numbers within the same Department/Subject, but have the same instructor and class meeting schedule (e.g., URP 4830-01/URP 5830-01, or ARC6011-01/4011-01/4031-01); and
Open University course sections will automatically be combined into the corresponding regular session section Canvas shell.

Manual Course Combinations

Faculty may request that separate BroncoDirect course sections be combined in the same Canvas shell for the purposes of efficient content creation and delivery and/or allowing cross-section interaction. These requests must meet the following criteria:

Course sections to be combined are of like subject.
No student submissions have been made in the separate Canvas sections (e.g., Assignments, Discussions, Quizzes, etc.)
The course sections share a common time and meeting place; OR the Canvas course is configured so that students in separate sections cannot be identified by or interact with students in the other sections. For instructions about how to isolate sections within the same Canvas shell, please see CAFE’s FERPA Compliance in Combined Canvas Courses web page.

Upon approval, course enrollments will be combined into one of the requested courses and all other original separate courses will no longer be usable by the instructor or the students.

Instructors can easily discern the originating section of each enrolled student by referring to the Grades or People section of the course.

Course combinations can be requested through our Canvas Requests page.

Course Content Services

Course Copy

Canvas allows copying of materials from one course to another, using one of two methods:

Instructors may copy content into a Canvas course from one of their other CPP Canvas courses. Instructors have the choice of importing all content or importing selected content.
Faculty may submit CAFE’s Canvas Requests form to request assistance copying materials from one CPP Canvas shell to another. Once requested, the process may take up to two business days. Please note, CAFE will not share course content from one instructor’s Canvas course to another instructor’s Canvas course without the express permission of both instructors.

Course Storage Quota

Each Canvas course is given a quota of 700 MB. This quota is used for content uploaded by the instructor.
Files copied from one Canvas course to another Canvas course do not count against the course quota for the receiving course. Files only count against the quota for the course in which the file was originally uploaded.
Quota increases are available upon request. Quota increase requests that push a course’s total quota over 1 GB must be approved by IT&IP.

Reset Course

Faculty may request to have their unpublished Canvas shells reset to delete all content by contacting the LMS Administrators at canvas@cpp.edu.

Copyright

Material uploaded by Cal Poly Pomona faculty, staff, and students is expected to fall within copyright guidelines.

Course Retention and Restoration Services

Not all Canvas courses may be shown on a user’s Canvas Dashboard. Users can see all their Canvas courses by clicking on the ‘Courses’ button, and then clicking the ‘All Courses’ link.

Retention Practices

Official CPP courses remain available in Canvas for 4 years. Beyond those 4 years, an additional 3 years of courses will be backed up to a repository and can be restored to Canvas upon request. The four-year time limit is adhered to for the following reasons:

To allow easy access to course material that will be used again.
To allow easy access to Canvas grades for grade appeals
To allow incomplete students to complete courses at the faculty member’s discretion

Course Restoration

Canvas courses are backed up weekly using Canvas Beta, allowing instructors to retrieve a copy of their courses from the most recent Saturday. Please send restoration requests to canvas@cpp.edu.

Instructors can also recover Canvas content they deleted in error by adding “/undelete” to the web address for the course home page (e.g., https://canvas.cpp.edu/courses/#####/undelete). Instructors may contact canvas@cpp.edu for help retrieving deleted content.