Archiving Canvas Data: A Solution for LMS Efficiency and Data Security

Alright. We're gonna get started. Thank you for joining us on this session, for archiving Canvas data. We're gonna be talking with Collin College and k sixteen solutions. So I was telling these folks, this is just a conversation that we are having, in the hallway that y'all get to listen to. So, my name is Ryan Lufkin.

I'm the vice president of global academic strategy here at Instructure, and I wanna, have my my fellow panelists introduce themselves as well. Hi, everybody. My name is Heather Webb Losch, and I'm the director of web services at Collin College. And I am Pamela Darling Fazio. I'm the director of e learning or our online learning department at Collin College.

And And I am Steve Milner. I'm the chief operating officer at k sixteen solutions. And so, really, we wanna hear about Collin College's story and and what led you to want slash need to archive, your courses within Canvas? So we integrated, implemented Canvas in twenty sixteen and we had every course loaded, which was a blessing during COVID because we were ready and all I had to do was hand it off off to Pamela to get started. But because we did that, we had over a hundred and forty four thousand courses in our Canvas instance. So you can imagine the problems that arose from that and that we needed to do something.

So we had suggested purging everything couple years, you know. And then, Pamela went to our leadership with the suggestion. They said, why don't you guys look into archiving stuff first? And we're like, okay. We'll do that. So that was kind of our first we knew we had a need.

We just didn't know what we were gonna do about it at the time. So And then we were actually at InstructureCon last year and it was the last day of the conference. We were going around to all the different vendors because, you know, they don't wanna bring their swag home. So we're trying to see how much we could gather to take back to our staff and we walked past k sixteen and there was a little area up there that said archive. And we stopped and we said, wait.

Do you really archive? And they said, well, we're just starting. We don't really know that much about it, but let's take your information down. So we gave more information, and the following week, Sam called us and started the conversation. Yeah. Yep.

One of the I think one of the I'm gonna dig into one of the comments you said a little bit. Because there are I think data archiving and data governance is a hot topic. And we hear a lot of schools talking about that, understanding the need, but they don't always feel the urgency. And and so you mentioned that there are problems with, having a hundred and sixty thousand courses in Canvas. Let's talk about that a little bit.

What what is the challenge there? Well, there's a couple challenges. From the admin side, we are seeing reports take hours to run. It's having to go through every user, every course, every term. And it's like, okay. Well, that's great.

But, you know, I really have other things to do today or I need to load a CSV file and I can't do that because the import's still running. We even had to change our SIS imports from running four times a day to two times a day just to give us a window to manually load things because they were stacking up in the queue because there were so much that they were having to load and go through. So that was on the admin side. On the faculty side, we see a whole different problems. Yeah.

We had faculty who had reached their allotment, user allotment space because they tend to upload PowerPoints, videos, and then they course copy over and over and over. So having six or seven years of data in there, they're just compounding the problem. We also have some very, graphic intense programs. We have video production programs. We have some graphic design.

And when students upload those assignments, they're very large files. And we actually had a student who ran out of their allotment space. We're not completely opposed to increasing that. But before we do it, we meet with the faculty or whomever and just kind of figure out is there a better option, but most of the time there isn't. It's just a lot of manual work to try to get rid of that.

And when it came to a student, there was no option really. We had to increase their allotment, which we didn't really want to do. Yeah. I I also think there's a there tends to be a a perception that this is harder or takes longer to implement. And this is where, you know, I'm gonna throw it over to you from k sixteen's side.

You know, I I know a little bit about it. I know the answer and it's inside baseball. But, how hard is it and how easy can you guys make it for institutions? Yeah. So it's really one of the easiest things you can do from an implementation perspective. That's what you're getting at.

You get credentials, you spin it up, we turn it on for you. You're up and running within ten, fifteen minutes. The wizard, super easy, takes you through it and you can start archiving really right away, you know, by term, by you know, quarter, whatever semester, and, you're really done pretty relatively quickly. And then you've got that content sitting in there as well as the data. So if you ever wanna push the content back in, right, if you archive a fair amount of stuff, you go hard delete that, you want it off the system or out of the LMS, and then you realize later, I still want that content, you can push that right back in.

So it's a very, very seamless process. Some of you may be archiving with us already with your legacy data. That was really how this archive solution got kicked off for us in the first place is if you're on, you know, Blackboard or Moodle or D2L or whatever and you're moving to Canvas, you had all that legacy student data that you had to retain. So we built the archive solution for that originally to be able to pull that in, connect that into Canvas, and give you that ease of archiving from that perspective. Then again, as we started to evolve and heard from, you know, institutions like Collin College, this was a problem not just with the legacy side, but really with the Canvas side as well, especially as you start to, you know, compile more and more data in there and more and more content in there, and then not really wanting to delete that for a whole host of reasons.

It just made a ton of sense to be able to spin this up for existing Canvas customers as well. Yeah. I think that's, again, one of those perceptions that archiving data means that data is lost or you you can't access it. And I think that the benefits of having it, accessible I mean, has call and call has run into that where you've archived data but you still need to access some of that? Oh, absolutely. Everything we've archived, we've set up a custom role in k sixteen so that deans, associate deans, dean of students office can request access to a student's records, course materials from three, four, or five years back, especially for, like, a grade appeal.

We literally just had one last week. A student that graduated in twenty twenty two or twenty twenty is applying to med school and is now appealing her grade for a and p or organic chemistry. Okay. I get it. But we went through, we went through all the course information, the logs, and all of that.

So they can still get to all of that information and make their assessment on that. The data is not gone, which is really, really nice. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's really everything.

Right? It's still in there. I mean, it's all the submissions. It's everything that you can think of. It's all there, and we we really refer to it as like a live archive. Yeah.

Right? I think oftentimes you hear the phrase archive, and you're like, you can zip it up, put it in a cold storage somewhere. I'll never find it again. That's not the case with this. This is very easy, very accessible, one click and you're wherever you need to be. Yeah.

I I think there's that idea that too, you know, you know, we might see more regulation on on accessing those. We might see, rules change where all will be in violation automatically if they come into play and and with this, you're kind of future proving that, right? Yeah. So that's a good point. We've actually got some some literature coming out on this here probably in the next two weeks or so. We've gone state by state and looked at all the different regulatory bodies, all the different accreditation requirements.

There's so much complexity to crafting a policy around what do you have to retain and what don't you have to retain. And we've we've gotten into this conversation now so many times with our our partner institutions who've gone, Yeah, we're gonna throw together a policy for archiving, this will take a minute. And then as soon as they start to dig in and realize that programmatically, there might be different requirements based on this accrediting body. And then, you know, if you take money, you know, from, from the military, if there's a GI bill, you know, then there's different, you know, requirements relative to to retention there. It's really, really complicated from a, archiving perspective from a retention perspective, and so we wanna make it as simple as possible to just make a policy that says, look, this is super cost effective.

Let's just move it off the LMS. We can hard delete out of there, still manage our LMS accordingly. To your point, you don't wanna run into situations where it's taken all day to run reports, you've got load issues, that kind of stuff, but at the same time, you're not in violation of some regulatory, you know, body or policy or whatever that you weren't even aware of. Yeah. You don't even know about yet.

Right? Exactly. So you mentioned Sam reached out, or you reached out, Sam responded. What did that process look like for implementing the the archiving solution? Well, the first step for us was developing a retention policy for Canvas. We have retention policies for student records, for financial data, all that other stuff. We had no retention program for our Canvas course shells.

They were completely different and no one had ever really thought about that. So that's what we had to do first Yeah. On our side. We had to come up with that. We looked at several of our programs and determined worked with our leadership to determine what would be the longest period that we really need to retain, and we found it was about five years.

So we're technically holding on to six. We have three in the archive and three in production. And that was the first step for us. Then the second step was we met with k sixteen, worked through kind of how many courses we need to archive, which ended up being about forty four thousand. So that was a little bit of a surprise to all of us that it was gonna be that high, and then set up the program.

And it was very simple. We actually have our rep is in Amsterdam, and she has been amazing. Just she's always available. We can she'll say, it's okay. I know it's nine o'clock on a Friday night, but I'll still meet with you guys.

So she's walked us through how to do it. She has, provided us with help documents that we can use. She helped us create some custom roles. Something. And and we can verify that they are who they are and we can assign them to that role and to that course.

So she's helped us set all of that up. And then we started doing the actual So So you've got that in place. You're you're moving forward. What is what benefits have you seen kind of on the back end of of moving those courses over? Well, we're we're still in the process of of completing everything. We've got a few terms purged, but not quite all of them yet.

We're kinda going slow because, you know, delete is delete. So, we're double checking, triple checking. But all in all, it's just nice to have a clean environment. I wanna go back to something you said earlier. We are very fortunate in our institution that we have a lot of backing that this is the longest we've ever had an LMS.

For for the history of everybody. We went from WebCT to Blackboard to Blackboard campus edition to Canvas. Right? Well, we every time we move to a new LMS, we would not move legacy data. We told them they had to rebuild it. Kinda like when you when you move around a lot, do you realize that you purge everything every time you move? And then you live in the house for long enough, you're like, where did all this stuff come from? Yeah.

Exactly. So so we were fortunate. We didn't have the legacy data. But as we were looking at this, oh my goodness, just eight years of Canvas already gave us this problem. Right? So it's something that we really had to look at.

And the more we kept Canvas and the more we knew we were gonna stay with Canvas, it's like, okay, we need to nip this in the bud now because it's only gonna get worse. So we know that, the systems are gonna run better. We know that we can find things easier. But on the faculty side is where we're really anticipating the benefits Yeah. To be seen.

We I I am also a faculty member, so I know this firsthand. When you go to do a course copy and you start typing in the course name, with eight years of data, you get a whole lot of courses. And they get truncated, so you're not sure exactly which one it is. So now with only having three years there, it's going to be much easier for the faculty to figure out what course they want. And then also, they do not get over our allotment anymore.

They're not gonna have that issue or they probably will some of them, but we're not gonna have that nearly as much as we used to where faculty are constantly over their allotment. We did make sure that we communicated with faculty often and early. We have been talking to them since October of last year, letting them know what our plan is, providing them with resources and help to export course content that will be purged or archived, to export grade books, how to put them on the cloud, all of that to kinda ease their concerns. And then we did it again in December, and we did it again in March. And now when they come back in August, we will have completed the process.

Yeah. Can I I'd love to actually ask a question that we haven't talked about, so not to put you on the spot, but, what was it as you started to put that policy together, right, how did you land on six years? Right? Three years in production, three years archive, then then start to hard delete. Because we found that five years was the longest retention policy that we had for our programs. And we wanted to just be a little more conservative. We also have a lot of courses that are only offered once a year.

So we wanted to make sure in our active production, we had at least two years, which will always have two concluded years plus the current year so that faculty won't because sometimes, you know, a faculty member may only teach that course once every second or third year. So we wanna make sure they could easily do a course copy because that was the biggest concern was how are they gonna react. Yeah. And then how do you what is your cadence moving forward? I know you're in the thick of it now, but, like, what does that cadence look like moving into the future? Yeah. We have a plan for that.

We're actually going to end the, September, early September. We'll roll over a new academic year. So we'll roll over a new academic year into the archive. The, oldest academic year in the archive will be purged out and we'll just keep doing that every September. So that way we keep it consistent.

I think especially that that point around, you know, more video, more as we look to create more engaging content for students, we're gonna be more more of those files that take up that space. And so by doing that, you're constantly kind of staying ahead of the game. That's amazing. The other thing we're we're looking at is the data security, obviously. We see it coming from the EU.

We see it in all these different places. We try and be ahead of the game. We're fortunate that our institution will support us with that. But when we know that something's coming like teachers shouldn't have access to former data in their classes or, they want their content, but they don't need the student data anymore. That gives this gives us an a way to give the right people the right access to what they need, whether it's the student data or the content.

Yeah. I think that's that's an incredible point because I think when we look back at COVID Yeah. And we look at how the schools that had, Canvas well adopted, you know, being used properly, we're in such a better position than those that weren't or in early phases. I think there's there's a parallel here to, you know, we know these regulations at some point will be coming out. We know that that we'll have to address that.

The better off you are putting those governance, policies in place now, the better off you'll be if those come out. Hundred percent, Ryan. I think, I'm glad you brought that up. We see a lot of I haven't I haven't really talked about it with this audience because of where we're sitting here today, but in Europe, what's going on with GDPR and the regulatory issues around retaining all that data in that live LMS, or they call it VLE over there, is extremely problematic for a lot of reasons. It was London Business School, one of the first that came to us and said, we've got to solve for this.

This is becoming a major issue for us when you've got content with not just content, with all that student data in there, and you've got TAs that have access to it, various professors that have access to it, and in some cases these students aren't even students anymore at the institution. So, how do we deal with this because we can't delete it? You're seeing a lot of that start to matriculate its way over here. California has got, you know, more stringent laws than a lot, and that's only going to continue when it comes to PII specifically. I think the other point I'd make relative to that is when you think about the LMS category, this is a relatively new young industry. Right? I mean, this, you know, say the word once, Blackboard invented the space, you know, in nineteen ninety eight or whatever it was.

Right? And there's no real adoption with an LMS until the early We're less than two and a half decades into this industry, if you will, from an LMS perspective. And the reason I bring that up is when you think about what is the purpose of an LMS, what is it designed to do, At its core, it's about content delivery. At its core, it's about teaching and learning. It's not built to be a data repository. That's not what it's designed to do.

And so, so I think a lot of institutions are starting to grapple with that and think about that and deal with that now, and that's sort of why we evolved this solution to go just from your legacy data into your existing Canvas data. Yeah. I I think that this is a new problem because I think prior to Canvas, the average lifespan for an LMS on campus was three to five years. We're almost twelve years into Canvas now, and we're seeing those that extend because the solutions evolve like they didn't before. Right? And and we're continuing to add features like you just saw us here and present.

And and so this is a this is gonna be an ongoing kind of compounding problem. It's a new problem. And so it's kind of why we're we're sharing this information. I think too for us, though, our leadership was very supportive once we said we're gonna secure student data. Yeah.

I think that's a Those words help. Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's actually a really important point. Let's think of that for a minute because I think the the the getting buy in from a lot of different, audiences here is is really important in the so what recommendation would you give to the audience on really starting this process and getting everybody bought in? I I think that was the key to us.

One one, we really involved our leadership in helping determine the retention plan. We asked for their input. We talked to them about it. We got their buy in on it. We told them how it's going to secure the data.

We talked to them about the future and what's happening, and we want to be ahead of the game. Yeah. Then to get the faculty buy in, we had to show them the benefits. They were going to it's gonna be easier for them to find their courses when they do a copy. It's going to be easier for them to upload files now because they're gonna have more space that's available.

It's gonna be better for their students as well. They're not gonna run into that issue. So weighing out the benefits to them and outlining them, and I think for us, emailing early and often was kind of our key. Yeah. And for those in the audience that want to hear more about that, I know you have some session tomorrow.

We can actually dig into some of those as well, right? Absolutely, we will. Yeah. So I think from, from laying the groundwork piece, I mean, k sixteen obviously has we have a booth. We have examples there. But, like, the to start a conversation or to help even provide guidelines around how to start with this, what what can audience members do with you, Steve? Yeah.

I mean, it's it's it's really easy. I mean, if you wanna come by the booth, we can demo this for you in five, ten minutes, show you exactly how it works, what it would look like. If you get back to to campus and you wanna share it with others, just reach out to us, and we're happy to set up time, you know, virtually to demo for anybody that you have that may wanna see that inside your institution. We try and be as easy as possible to work with. So come by the booth, reach out to us, set up time, and, we're more than happy to spend as much time as you'd like getting into the details.

Yeah. And I think the interface has changed drastically since we started, and it's it's so much cleaner now for us to to just literally click term, click term, open it, view the courses, do a search, and find what we need very quickly. Because, again, we have now forty four thousand courses in that archive. Right. If you if you were archiving that in cold storage, you might as well just delete it.

Yeah. Exactly. And that and that's the good point for us is the it was the combination of purging and archiving that worked for us. You know, after eight years, we don't need to keep eight years. If you're looking at re you know, copying a course from twenty sixteen, our recommendation is kinda rebuild it.

There's new stuff out there. You know, you're not it shouldn't be reusing something that old. That that is something this could be a forcing function. Right? To to move some of our educators into a more modern, course experience, things like that as well. Right? Exactly.

And so that's where we kinda decided a good combination. Keep three years, archive three, and then purge the oldest. It if you don't if you're using a course from twenty sixteen, I guarantee Canvas is new. Yeah. Canvas looks different.

You're probably not using the best features, that are there today. So that's that's our recommendation. Great point. Yeah. If you could go back to before you started this process, tell yourselves, one or two things, what would that be? Oh, have grace.

We we put a lot of pressure on ourselves. This past academic year, we moved our SIS, we moved our portal interface, and then we were also doing this project. And it's the two of us doing this project. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think we beat ourselves up a little bit. And I think we sometimes forecasted the worst, and we shouldn't have done that either. People we have a, as probably most people, a very outspoken faculty And we kind of expected some blowback and we never got it. So that was we we actually after I sent the first email, I got an email back, this was in October, from a faculty saying, now that you did this purge, I lost everything.

I'm like, yeah, we haven't done anything yet. If you read the email, it says we'll do it next year. So I think that we kind of expected and and just really if it's gonna if it takes longer than you think it's gonna take, that's okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That was ours. We we we had in our head, oh, we're gonna do this by December. Well, that didn't happen. Yeah.

I mean, I think being real realistic with time frames, having that flexibility. But you guys are also kind of proof that you don't have to have large staffs to to approach this. Right? K sixteen is a great partner in helping manage this and scaling it to the right approach. Right? For sure. Yeah.

It was just the two of us doing ninety percent of it. Wow. Which which it because it was easy. It honestly was. It really was.

You know, just click through the wizard, tell what terms you wanna archive, and it pushes them in there. And then we we did a lot of checking. We went into k sixteen. We verified the count in k sixteen matches what we have in Canvas for that term, and we went term by term until we had every single one identical. Did we have the CSV function yet at that point where we'd provide that? No.

No. Yeah. That Yeah. Totally different. We do now.

Explain that a little bit, Steve. Well, yeah. If if you're gonna hard delete, right, I think sometimes we get a little bit nervous. You're going to archive. There'll be a I'm not sure what you call it.

Is it like an error log, Sam? Yeah. That'll show anything that maybe didn't come across for whatever reason. Right? It is very rare, but there might be a few, like, one offs for whatever reason. Then it'll generate a CSV file that'll let you know exactly what came, so when you go to hard delete, you've got that confidence that everything is in there. Yeah.

We created an Excel file that we shared with that one. You were you were early. Yeah. Yeah. And and k sixteen and Canvas have been partners for know how many Six years? Six years.

I think it's Five years. As long as I've been here, about as long as I've been here. Yeah. Yeah. And and so there there's one of the things about you as a partner is is the level of communication we have, the the, you know, our our CSMs know you, our our teams know you.

So it's it's one of those collaboration pieces that I think is really helpful for our customers is, you know, you you heard, Mitch talk yesterday about that that openness and that reliability of the communication that we have. I think that's one of the benefits we have of being so closely partnered. Yeah. I think there's to piggyback on that a little bit, totally agree. And I think a lot of that comes from six years of working in the Canvas platform too.

Right? Like this this offering specifically is relatively new, but for the last six years, we've been migrating course content from all kinds of other LMSs around the globe onto the Canvas platform, archiving on the Canvas platform, working inside the Canvas platform, working with your tech team. We really truly understand that platform inside and out. So this isn't some, you know, fly by night, we threw together an archive because we saw a problem, in the eleventh hour. This is something that, was a reaction to the market. You know, it was a lot of our partner institutions that we work with in other products telling us, this is a problem for us.

Can you help us solve it? And having that deep understanding of the Canvas plat Canvas platform, gives the ability to do that, I think, in a really, really effective way. And one thing for us too is the bill for k sixteen came from Instructure. So for us, we knew if Instructure's willing to put their name on this product, then we were okay with it because we knew we were one of the early adopters and you're always a little nervous when you're an early adopter of something but coming from Instructure, one it made it easier for purchasing. We're from Texas. We have a whole mess of purchasing issues.

We have to go through all these sole source issues. So coming from Instructure automatically made it much easier for us, and it gave us some confidence too. That's a really good point as far as it just it makes the procurement process super seamless to be able to go through it from that perspective. Texas is yeah. We're we are TEXRAMP certified with SOC two, Type two, ISO twenty seven thousand with all the the certifications.

But again, being able to procure that through Canvas and knowing that Canvas is putting their name on it, it's not it's not an easy process to to get Canvas to ultimately become a reseller for you. Right? You guys have, yeah, you have a thousand partners by now, and you resell a small handful of those. Yes. There's a small handful that are resell partners and growing. But I I think one of the there's I always like to say there's a certain number of vendors that are kind of inside the tent, right, that we work with really closely.

And k sixteen is obviously one of those, you know, along with a handful of others. Just because any level of cooperation, the resources that you bring to the table to make sure that we solve the problems, you know, that that we encounter and and everybody has a smooth experience. So what's next? I mean, for for what what you all are doing? Well, for us, we're gonna continue to roll over the next academic year and kind of monitor our retention, make sure that it stays consistent with what we plan on. You know, if we get a report saying, oh, nursing's now seven years or nursing's now four years, then we can modify things as we move forward. We're also setting up processes Yeah.

Independent within our department to allow those who need access access. We have a heat ticketing system that we use for all of our technology help desk type of things, and we've created some service request forms. So if there is an associate dean or a dean who needs access to a course, they can fill this form out. We will look at it. We'll determine it.

We can create the role in k sixteen, and then we can add them that way. Yeah. We do we're doing a second one, a second service request for faculty who say, I need my course from twenty twenty one back. So how are they gonna do that? We're we're gonna do a form that they have to fill out to get it back. Yeah.

I I think that's one of the one of my questions would be like, what were the what are the unforeseens? Right? And and that I think would probably be one of them. Any other any of those kind of unforeseen as you went down the path that We we tested those forms a lot, and we modified them a lot. Yeah. And we we now our our next step is to actually write, like, a process, an SOP, essentially, for how we're gonna do that. Yeah.

I wanna make sure we have some time for questions. We we okay. Any questions in the audience on anything we we covered, haven't covered? So the question was, by archiving, do you use your lose your ability to long term do analysis, long term trending analysis, on on your courses? You know, that's a really good question. Our faculty are kind of responsible for that. We don't do a lot of trending reports for our deans.

They're not quite into the outcomes and rubrics and that kind of thing. The most of the reports that we handle are things like courses being unpublished or last activity dates. Not really that kind of thing. We look at pretty much just the current academic year for our reporting on our side. Yeah.

And I Steve, I know you do a lot with creative things with data. Do you Yeah. No. It's a it is a great question. The the short answer is no.

You don't lose that ability. There's a handful of ways that you can still access that, which I can talk to you offline if you'd like. But the short answer is we have some other offerings out there that would allow you to port a multitude of different data sources altogether that allow for that. But if you're just talking about that specifically, then we can do one time polls if we need to, and and allow you to access that for those specific purposes. Is there a course size limitation? Was the first question.

For individual course or all courses? No. We haven't. We didn't run into any individual courses. We did hit their max of fifty thousand. Because at first, we archived everything, just thinking, let's just see what happens.

And we did hit a max, so then we started deleting the ones we didn't really want. So, yeah. The the I mean, from a contractual perspective, no. There's no an individual course is an individual course. You may have some outliers, but that's totally fine.

The fifty thousand cap is based on the certain pricing tiers. Right? So once you go over that, you can go over that if you want. It's a it's a very modest price increase from there. It then goes into bands of additional ten thousand courses. Right? So fifty thousand to sixty thousand, sixty thousand to seventy thousand.

I'd say maybe five, ten percent of our customers go past that fifty thousand. It's fairly rare, but, it's fairly affordable. If you are running past that, you're you're probably a larger institution and the cost overruns on that are very, very minimal. So for everybody else, the the question was, what does the performance hit when you're actually performing the archiving on the Canvas performance? Do we need to There's none. Yeah.

No. There's none. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It because because it just pushes it out. So nothing I would say the performance hit is on k sixteen if if there's a performance hit. Yeah. It's not on Canvas. Yeah.

It it's there you'll notice no impact. They'll do it during finals, which, you know, please, just because, you know, we've never encountered one, but that doesn't mean that there couldn't be one. So, yeah, It's always a Yeah. But it's just a poll. So, yeah.

Any other questions on there? So the question is if you've archived, data from six years ago, how does an individual access that data? I think it's We created a role in k sixteen in the archive that is a view only role. So we can assign that role to a dean who is doing the grade appeal, and then we can assign that course to that role. And then they actually go into k sixteen, they get a login, but all they see is that one course. And they can go into the grade book, into the modules, into the assignments, all of that. Yes.

Because if we push a course back to Canvas, it's not with student data. It's the content. So which is great for us too because we have you know, we've had situations where a faculty leaves, they were the only one who taught the course, and now some new faculty is like, I was told I could have that. So now we can push it back. What we we have to jump through a few hoops because we have to go and add yeah.

But we can we can make that happen. And then all they get is the content. Because right now, before what we were doing, we were actually adding a faculty to a concluded course, which is a violation. Yeah. That's fun.

Clunky and a violation of everyone. But that's what we're getting that's how we were doing it. Hypothetically, maybe that's what you would have done in that situation at the time. Hypothetically. We could also we would also export it sometimes, but this this just pushes it straight back to them.

It doesn't concluded doesn't wipe them out, it just locks it in our instance. The students are in the course still. We can see them. Yeah. We can see them and we can see their grades when it's concluded.

A faculty just can't change anything. Yeah. So I'm gonna answer oh. Just ask me. Just ask me.

Yeah. Okay. So I think that the question was we're not actually archiving any Kaltura data, but any of the links that are in there that would go back to Kaltura, those are all in that archive still. So, the LTI launch, whatever it may be, Sam, is that accurate? Yeah. So, that's all going to be part of the archive, but we wouldn't technically be archiving the Kaltura data or content because that's not ours.

That's not yeah. Go ahead. With a role. Alright. I'm I'm going mobile to say.

Alright. We can we can not yell. Yeah. Just, just following up with the with his question. So when you put that user with the special role into that archived, I guess, course, are the links working to all these third party tools? Yes.

Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Well, does that include, like, the if they require an API developer key to to access that, are y'all able to are y'all copying that kind of stuff as well? Sam? No? Sam. Sam, you got an answer to that? But once it's back in Canvas, you'd be able to access it.

Okay. Second question. We have a Canvas hosted instance and it's possible for us to delete a course, let it sit there, and then undelete and restore it. How is your solution superior to that? Well, it's still, I mean, at the end of the day, you're still, it's still on the Canvas platform, but it hasn't left the Canvas platform. You're talking about a soft delete versus a hard delete? Yeah.

So you're you're you're not necessarily There's a handful of things you're not solving for. You're not necessarily solving for the slowness of the system. Right? Because that's all still It's all still stored in Canvas. Yeah. It's all still stored in Canvas.

So you're you're running into virtually all the same issues that Collin College was looking to solve for, art solved for in in a soft delete necessarily. Yeah. I think, yeah. Ultimately, it's moving it off of Canvas so you get the performance benefits and the security benefits, all of that. Okay.

Thank you. Perfect. Any Any other question? Alright. Right here. Okay.

So so when you archive the course and then like let's say it's two years later, but you need to pull it back and you need the student data and the student information, you're able to pull that back or it's just the course content? No. When you pull it back, it doesn't have student data, but that's where we have the custom role. So we can add that we can create as many custom roles as we want. Just like in Canvas, you can create custom roles as an admin. So we can create a custom role, even call it a teacher role, and put them back into the course in in the archive, and they can still see all the student data there.

I guess that's what I mean. So so like if so if they're viewing it in the archive, they can view, like, if you have a a student where they say, they're contesting a grade. We have this happen where it's it seems to me like a long time past when you should. And so but they but they would still be able you could put them in there and they could still view that student data. Yes.

In the archive, they can view all the student data. Yeah. I mean, you can you can export it. Yeah. You can do whatever you want with it.

Oh, yeah. You can export the grade data. Yeah. The only thing you can't do is just push that student data specifically back into Canvas. But if you want to export that, if you want to PDF it, you want to print like, whatever you want to do with it in the archive, you've got access to do that.

Yeah. And we didn't wanna export the data back. We wanted to only allow them to view it in the archive. What's the difference with well, I guess I answered my own question, but I was asking because we have Scaffold. Yeah.

So Canvas archive and Scaffold is two different things. Correct? Yeah. So great. So Yes. So the Scaffold archive is the legacy archive.

So I'm assuming you came off of We're migrating from Blackboard. We'll be live in August. So you guys have migrated our Blackboard data, some into Canvas because we needed that up to date both the current semesters. And then our legacy data is in scaffold. But I was just trying to figure out the difference between the two because they I mean, it's really like both archiving.

Yeah. Yeah. No. It's a great it's a great question. So so basically, you're gonna get access to both.

Right? So for the same price. So you'll have your your legacy archive, the scaffold archive, which is gonna be all your historical Blackboard data, and then you'll get a Canvas archive as well. So over time, you'll start to go to move that Canvas data into the Canvas archive, and then over time, depending on whatever policy you all have in place Yeah. Start to purge out of that traditional historical legacy archive. So eventually, you'll no longer need that legacy archive, potentially.

I mean, some people hold onto that forever. Right? But you you you may not need that at some point, but you already have the Canvas archive spun up, so you'll be able to start moving the Canvas data in. I think the only difference between how these two describe their process, which is three years, move it, then after three years, delete it, is you just got one extra step in there with that legacy data as well. Okay. Does that make sense? Okay.

So, when we inquire about it, it's a separate separate price or Nope. It's all included. Oh, good. Yep. You'll get yep.

That's great. You'll get you'll get both. You'll get both. Yeah. Thank you.

Yeah. I I mean, the the difference is obviously for in this situation, there was no need to have a legacy archive. Right? But if you are moving to Canvas, and you've got all that historical student data, you're gonna get both archive instances. You're just not really gonna need the Canvas one right away because it's really you know what I mean? Right. And over but over time, you'll start to wanna move stuff into that one.

So yeah. Great question. You're sitting right in the middle. You ain't gonna making me run around, get my steps in. Yeah.

So, I have a question. Are you planning to automate things like the to to to extract it from the canvas to and also to automate deletion from camp automate the hard delete in campus and also automate the retention within k sixteen. So that's been a, a long internal discussion, right? The challenge with well, so first of all, it wouldn't be hard to do, right? We could do that. Is that ultimately what institutions want? That you could run into the fact you turn on the automation, you you change your policy, you forget about something. Anytime there's a hard delete that takes place, we think you should probably shy away from automating that.

The simplicity of how this works though, it it I think automating it might be just over engineering a a problem that's not that big. Right? I mean, you click your terms, you click your semesters, you push the button, you move it, generates a CSV file and you hard delete and and you're done. So I don't think we would want an automation on our end. No. Because we did change our mind.

You know, we we did move our timelines. And even now, we were thinking originally of moving the current moving our our rolling to September one, and then we said, wait. No. We have to wait until the census date. So it changes all the time in our heads.

The the automation, though, would really I mean, it'd have to come from Instructure. Right? Because we're not we're not the ones who hard delete. That's that's up to Instructure. So you could automate In theory, it wouldn't be that hard to automate the process if you wanted to. I still think there would be a a human loop, trigger there at some way just because I think that's the the safest approach.

Are we though, Sam? Are we automating the terms though where you're starting to do you wanna speak to that real quickly? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're a big fan of the automation.

But as far as deletes, I wanna be the one that actually go push the button. Yeah. We actually did we're doing a test a delete in our test environment before we did the delete in our production environment. Yeah. So Yeah.

So we're we're pretty much out of time. I think lessons takeaway lessons from this is, you know, don't hesitate to start developing that data governance policy. It's It's probably easier than you think it is to move forward with this. Feel some urgency around getting it done. I think the with the the rapidity of change and what we're seeing in the market, it's something that you're you're better off to have that that data archived.

Any anything I'm forgetting? No. I'd just say feel free again. If you wanna see it, spend some time with it, interact with it, just come by the booth. We're, right in the middle. Yep.

Go visit k sixteen at their booth, and, Collin College has their presentation tomorrow earlier in the day? Nine nine AM. Nine AM. And, they can tell you more. Thanks so much, everybody. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you.