Canvas Credentials & Catalog: Beginning of the Year Admin Best Practices

Welcome. Welcome, folks. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening wherever you were joining us. Thank you so much for coming to this, our webinar on beginning of your best practices, credentials and catalog.

We'll get started in about two and a half minutes. As more folks join us, thank you so much everyone for being here. We're gonna get started in two minutes for this, your webinar on giving of your admin best practices for Canvas credentials and Canvas catalog. Thank you so much. In two minutes, we'll get started giving everyone a couple more minutes to come in.

Thank you so much. I see some familiar faces in the attendee list. I see some familiar instructor faces in the attendee list. So glad to have you here, folks. One more time for the folks just coming in.

We're gonna get started in exactly one minute. Thank you so much for being here. Good morning from Los Angeles, California. Good morning. Good afternoon.

Good evening. Whatever time it is and they were you are. Thank you for being here with me, Benjie, and Instructure for this Grow webinar on beginning of year admin best practices for credentials and catalog. Forty five seconds and we're gonna get this show on the road. Alright, folks.

As the music fade away, that means it is time to get started one last time for the folks who just joined us in the last few seconds. Welcome to this, our webinar on beginning of the year admin best practices for canvas credentials and Canvas catalog. Before we get started, might as well take a moment to introduce myself and an instructor friend I have on the line with us to help out today. Hi, everybody. My name is Benjie Messinger Barnes, formerly a k twelve math classroom teacher, turned EdTech admin, brought Canvas LMS to my k twelve institution, fell in love with the products, but more importantly, the people.

And so I, like many of my friends and colleagues at Instructure, have tread along the customer to employee pipeline. Thrilled to be here at Instructure. Generally thrilled to be here specifically with you as we engage in these best practices for credentials and catalog. And I wanna welcome up to the camera my friend, Melissa McClellan. Melissa, come on camera.

Give a wave to the crowd. My dear friend coming to us from the great state of Illinois, another member of the product specialist team who focuses on edtech effectiveness, Think Impact, and has been so gracious as to join us today to help out monitoring your q and a amongst other things. She'll yell at me if questions come in, and I fail to look at them as I am so deeply entrenched in that which I am saying and that which I am screen sharing. So thank you, Melissa, for being here. I appreciate you.

Alright. Alright. Alright. Now, like with any good experience together, let's go ahead and share. What are we trying to do today? What are we trying to do today? Most importantly, we're trying to set you and your organizations up for success for the upcoming academic year.

Holy cow. It's already August first. We wanna share some best practices, some tips, some tricks, some admin tax, specifically for Canvas credentials in Canvas catalog. I gotta be honest with you. A lot of the best practices we're gonna share are generally good housekeeping practices that we should do throughout the year, not just at the beginning.

But, hey, this is a good temporal cue to go and attend to those housekeeping best practices. Some of them are specifically beginning of the year items. And and why Canvas credentials and why Canvas catalog together? Well, we've got so many customers, so many partners who leverage these solutions in tandem to support their programming and their learners. Canvas catalog. Let's help folks find some learning experiences and get the word about all the amazing things that we're doing.

Canvas credentials. When our learners complete those experiences, let's certify them with shareable, verifiable, and data rich digital badges. We're gonna be sharing some best practices, tips and tricks, but, yes, every organization is unique. So I urge you to take them, and then think about how they do apply to your programming and how you might wanna tweak them for your programming. With that in mind, gotta always make an acknowledgment of the Instructure community.

It is a wealth of knowledge with guides, blog posts, idea forums, discussions. Please make sure you are visiting the Instructure community. Often, it is a wonderful, wonderful place. Like I said, Melissa is on the line with us today monitoring the q and a. And if for whatever reason a question comes to you later or we don't get to any of your questions today, go ahead and get in contact with your CSM.

They and we would be happy to get you the information and resources you may need. One thing we always wanna do, like we just did moments ago and like you and we should do every time we're thinking about the upcoming year is I love this question that I heard from one of my colleagues. What do we wanna be celebrating in one year? August first twenty twenty five, when we look back at the year that has just passed, what is it that we wanna celebrate that we succeeded with and that we accomplished? There are so many different goals that our customers, that our partners have outlined for Canvas credentials and Canvas catalog, and I'm gonna share just a few of them that I've heard in the last few weeks. We've got some great use cases and examples for lots of them, so feel free to ask your CSM and say, hey. Ben, you mentioned some great professional development use cases for catalog and credentials.

Can you share some examples? We would be happy to share them with you. So maybe it's professional development using Canvas catalog to help your faculty find those learning experiences, and then tracking their completion, reporting their completion, structuring learning journeys for them with Canvas credentials pathways, or motivating them by giving that that instant celebration and affirmation and acknowledgment with a digital credential when they complete that PD. Maybe you're looking to offer your program into a wider community and increase enrollment and perhaps grow revenue by leveraging catalog to external stakeholders. Find what you're doing and credentials to give them not only a PDF, but verifiable, shareable, and data rich credential that they earn upon completion to show the competencies and skills that they've acquired. Maybe you're trying to help your higher ed students with their skills, career readiness, developing these employer partnerships or workforce opportunities.

Maybe it's curricular programming. Maybe it's cocurricular programming. We got a lot of folks using credentials for maybe first year student programming, those orientation events and making sure that they complete them. Maybe for credit, maybe not for credit. I know CBE competency based education and these ideas of dual transcripts have been really, really popular recently.

Lot of folks using credentials for that. Or maybe you're in the state of Florida where fundamentals of written communication is a requirement for all learners, and they have to have a digital micro credential to show that they've done it. Lot of folks using credentials for just that. Or actually a novel use case that I heard recently from a conversation with a k twelve institution last week. I thought it was so exciting.

One, they said, we wanna use credentials to affirm and celebrate our students hundred hours of community service. I said, that's a great idea. Absolutely. And or this was this was we don't have any use cases yet that I know of. This is the first time I ever heard of it.

Last week, they said, we've got some great adult parent guardian community members, and we wanna engage them even more. We wanna make a pathway of all of those parent adult guardian events that we host. Back to school night, ninth grade orientation night, whatever it may be, to motivate them to engage even further with our programming. And that's what it's all about. Right? It all boils down to how are we going to support those community members and ultimately our learners.

So always a good practice, especially at the beginning of a new year. Let's set some goals, and then let's share them out. Let's communicate to our community members often and early. Why are we using Canvas credentials, or why are we using catalog? Why is this gonna be helpful to our students, to our faculty, to our parent, adult, guardian community members, other folks? Why is it gonna be helpful for them? Is there a call to action that they need to do? Do they need to enable themselves? And if so, are we going to train them? If so, how and when? Communication. Communication.

Communication. Okay. We have a jam packed agenda now that we're ready to actually get started. Holy cow. That is a lot of items we're gonna attend to, and so I couldn't imagine that folks would remember every single one of them.

And so we got it in the chat so you can reference it throughout the way. What we're gonna do is we're gonna crank through some catalog, some credentials items, take a twenty second time out, pause for q and a, especially because, Melissa, I actually failed to press the q and a button when we started. So I can't see them if they're coming in, so I'm really gonna need you to help out. Thank you. And then we'll go on to catalog.

And then we got some exciting announcements before sharing at the end, but also now and throughout gratitude. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here, folks. Okay.

On with the show to cannabis credentials, the first item as we think about the new year upon us is, let's establish that team, especially if there's been any movement. Throughout this slide presentation, you'll see some hyperlinks. I'm not gonna pick on them now, but those are links to community guides. The community is so wonderful. And when we share this out to our attendees later, this slide deck and recording, I invite you to click on these links to see a more detailed description of how to do that, which we're gonna kinda wave our hands at here.

So first thing off the bat, whoever's on your credentialing team, make sure to let your CSM know so they can include them in any timely and pertinent communications. Wanna make sure they are all in the loop. Second, if you have any new team members on your credentialing team, perhaps you have gone through the Canvas credentials customer training course. It is a fantastic enablement opportunity hosted on Canvas LMS, of course, and the number one way that our customers, that are our partners learn how to use the product of Canvas credentials. Where do I click to do this and that? And as you go through, the cogs start turning in our head about, oh, how is this going to strategically support our programming? Okay.

And you wanna think about who is gonna be a, capital a, admin on your Canvas credentials organization. And so only admin can add other admin from your credentials dashboard. Admin, you can add one. Or by clicking on the little ellipses right there, you can also remove admin who may not be on your team anymore. Just wanna make sure we got the right folks in place.

So that's item number one, getting the people in the right place. Number two, let's think about configuring our organizational settings. First, really high level. We'll talk about that explicitly. And then the granular settings, which we're gonna kinda wave our hands at a little bit.

We want to configure our organizational settings because every organization has a public facing profile. And so at the minimum, we wanna make sure that this is as we want it to be. We wanna make sure to have a logo. That is your logo. We wanna make sure the organization name is as you'd like it to be, and the description, which would be public facing, is something that you think truly connotes your programming here.

We got a guide on how do I manage my Canvas Connectors organization settings, and I want to make a note, especially if there's been any personnel changes. The contact email for your organization, Best practice, to make it a generic institutional email. For instance, in this example, we put support at badger dot com. Not b messenger barnes at instructure dot com. We're thinking generic something or other at instructure dot com.

Why? Why is that the case? Well, who knows what kind of movement we're gonna have. If the organizational email address is a person's email address, and that person's email address goes away because they've left, we're gonna be in a little bit of a bind. So suggestion, make it a generic institutional email, and I do wanna make a note. As you're trying to do that, if you're trying to update the organizational email address, when a user is doing that, they can choose only their own email. You can't just type in an email.

So that means you wanna make an account with and for that generic email address, sign in as it, and then set that to be the organizational email address. Okay. That was the high level org stuff. After that, you can see we got a ton a ton a ton of toggles that you can toggle on and off. We're not gonna go into every single one of these.

These are gonna be unique to you and your program. Again, a link to the guide. And I do suggest go through every single one and determine, is this or is this not gonna meet our needs? And if you can't understand, look in the community, and then reach out to your CSM. We'd be happy to advise. So a bunch of settings here, even more settings.

Again, a lot to go through, so I invite you and recommend you go through each of them with you and your team. What we've talked about so far, general housekeeping stuff, nothing really beginning of the year specific yet. I doubt this would be either, but this could be a time your organization and even its issuers can customize the notifications that go out to your users when they earn a badge, they're invited to a pathway, a badge expires, a badge is revoked, or a group is about to end. And if by any chance you think that any of your notifications, has some time stamps in them, like, they say twenty twenty three or twenty twenty four or spring twenty twenty four, might be a good idea to, one, housekeeping best practice, look over and just make sure they are as you want. And two, if they're time stamped, go ahead and adjust them.

And through the organizational settings, notification settings, you can choose the notification types. You can customize it. And if for whatever reason you think, wow. I have really followed this up. I wish I could just go back to the default.

You can go ahead and press on this reset button. So I just wanted to make a note of that. So we have attended to the highest level, the org level. Let's make our way down now to the issuer level. The issuer is the entity that actually issues or awards badges.

And maybe maybe it's the case that you've experienced a lot of success with your credentialing program, and you are ready to expand it to a new program, a new department, a new school, a new cohort. And if that is the case, you might need to add a new issuer by either on the issuers tab in your organization, and this is gonna be something that only admin can do, creating a new issuer from scratch, or adding an existing personal issuer on the free space for Canvas badges and bringing it into your Canvas credentials organizations so you can manage it, have access over it, and get that all important data and analytics associated with it. So that's how we might include new issuers for an expanding program. And I wanna make a note that each of these issuers has their own public facing page, just like the org did. So they can be branded at the issuer level as well, show up on the public organization page to spread the word and become brand ambassadors, spreading awareness for their programming, which we're gonna look into right now.

So if you were to click on these ellipses right here and edit the issuer, you have a page that looks very similar to the high level organizational settings that we saw earlier. The issue itself can have an image and a name and a website URL and a description and, again, the contact email. Wanna make sure that's a generic email there. And I'm gonna show here, and this is gonna come up again and again and again. And then finally, I'm gonna actually demo it.

Do we want this issuer, yes or no, to show up on our organization's public page? Right? That public page is something that you can choose to share out to external stakeholders to say, hey. Here are the issuers and badges and pathways that we've got going on. Are these of interest to you? Might you want to enroll? What calls to action might we have there? And so I invite you to consider what you do want on that public facing page and what you don't want, especially those, like, testing orgs and those testing badges and those testing pathways where it's called, like, testing pathway, August first, number seven. You're like, yeah. We don't need other people to see that.

Let's keep that one private. So that is one way to adjust it, and I'll show you another one later. So we talked about big picture issuer, making them adjusting their public profiles there. Secondly, our staff. Right? When we have a new issuer and or if there's any movement in our team, we might need to either add staff to an issuer.

We might need to edit or remove staff from an issuer. And I do wanna make a note that as you do this, there are a couple of different roles for staff members. They can be an owner, an editor, or just staff, and they each have different access and privilege. And I invite folks to check out both the guide on how do I add and manage each of our staff and Canvas badges and a nice little chart showing different organizational and issuer permissions linked right here. We've talked about the organization.

We talked about the issuers. Now on to the capital g groups. And in specific, we'll wanna have an attention to the group expiration dates. And so I have a little handy dandy visual to hopefully help us here. The first thing I will say to hopefully ass wage concerns is worst case scenario, a group expires that's not meant to expire, and the people in it say, I'm not getting any badges anymore.

I'm very anxious. I'm flooding your inbox with angry emails. It's okay. It's okay. Worst case scenario, you can just edit the group, change the expiration date to be in the future.

It reactivates. Badges are aborted. Everything is groovy. So it's always helpful to say the worst case scenario is a pretty good scenario. And how can we identify that in advance to not go through the headache of having anxious learners and a flooded inbox? Well, here I am in an issuer called Benjie's badge hook.

This is where I do my testing, and we've got a couple of groups. And I see that I have a group whose name is this is a group that continues year over year that I definitely want to stay active. Okay. That's an interesting name for a group. But, hark, I see that the group was archived a couple weeks ago.

Oh my goodness. Good thing I checked as part of my beginning of year best practices to notice that. I can edit the group and change the expiration date. Or maybe I have extremely important group twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five. I hope this group doesn't accidentally expire midyear.

It looks like it's going to expire on October fourth. Good thing we caught that in advance. Let's go ahead and edit the group and push out that expiration date. Or maybe I've got econ one zero one, fall twenty twenty four. It's gonna expire on December twentieth.

That's good by me. I know that's past the semester end date. We're Ruby. Or econ one zero two spring twenty twenty five, that's active until June third. That's well beyond the second semester end date.

I'm feeling good. No need to worry about it. So and attention to groups. We're kind of going from the top all the way down. We talked about the organization.

We talked about the issuer. We talked about the groups, and now to the badges. We got a pretty hefty slide coming up. So here we go, friends. Whoo.

Here is an example on the right hand side of a badge that I made up to kinda illustrate a couple of things. This is one that really, is a beginning of the year best practice. When you look at a badge and its design and all the metadata, there are a number of times and places where it might be timestamped. And in fact, we often recommend that folks time stamp their badges. Right? If this is HIPAA training twenty twenty four, then it should say twenty twenty four.

Right? If it's twenty twenty five, it should say twenty twenty five. So to check, one, the badge image. Does it have a time stamp in it? The badge name, does it have a time stamp in it? The badge description, the badge expiration, might not be something we need to pay attention to. The earning criteria, is there anything in there that might need to get updated with a new academic year? And might there be a call to action or a link in the badge that we wanna update? In this case, and this is something that a lot of our partners have done, and I think it's a really great idea. They'll say, hey.

Here's a badge that we have on our public facing page that folks might be really interested in earning, and they say, wow. I wanna earn that badge. How do I earn that badge? And right here in the description, it says, you wanna earn this badge? Click here and go to a Canvas catalog listing to enroll in a course, take the course, and then earn that badge. So a number of ways that you want to attend to in case that badge is time stamped. Now if we're gonna use this badge again, or rather if we want to offer a similar badge moving forward, but we need it to say something different, there might be a reflection.

Should I update this badge? Should I just edit it to say twenty twenty five? Or should I duplicate it and make a new badge and just edit that one? Spoiler alert, make a new one. Why? If we edit or update any part of a badge class, a badge, that update, any update we make is going to retroactively push to all previous assertions, all previous awards for that badge class. So if we say, oh, yeah. Let me just edit this and write twenty twenty five. Then that person who earned it in twenty twenty four is gonna now have a badge that says twenty twenty five, and I don't think that's appropriate.

I don't think that's what we wanna do. And so, generally, if we wanna have a similar badge, we wanna go ahead and make a copy, a duplicate of it, and then edit the the copy. How do we make a copy? We go ahead and click on that little ellipses as we often do, and we duplicate that badge. What about badges we don't wanna use? What about badges they're like, okay. That was great.

We don't wanna use it anymore, like the HIPAA training twenty twenty four badge or the HIPAA training twenty twenty three badge. We got a couple of options here. Archiving a badge, which you can see from ellipses, archive, removes it from the issuer badge list, out of sight, out of mind if you wanna keep a tidy house. It removes it from any groups, which means it can't be awarded to folks in that group. It can be unarchived at any time, so it's kind of a low stakes removal, so to say.

And previous awards are unaffected. It's kinda like putting it in a closet. Like, well, we don't need you for now. We're not gonna use you. We can't use you.

We can take you out at any time, but no one sees you out of state, out of mind. Painting this house. Fantastic. A more aggressive choice for a badge that you do not want to use anymore is deleting a badge. But I wanna make a note about deleting a badge.

Deleting a badge is like deleting it as though it never ever ever existed. You cannot delete a badge unless you first revoke all the awards of that badge. Right? So maybe you've awarded it a hundred and seventeen times, and then you're like, okay. I guess I have to to take back all one hundred and seventeen of those awards. Sorry.

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. And then delete it.

It's gone from existence, and it cannot be undone. And so with that in mind, we generally recommend archiving badges. The kinds of badges that we've seen folks delete most often are the testing ones where the badge is called, like, test badge number seven. Right? In that case, like, we definitely don't need it. We're not gonna award it.

We can just strike it from the record. Similarly, if you're not gonna use a badge anymore, you may or may not want it to be on the organizational public page. And so three ellipses, make private. We're gonna revisit that a little bit later. Oh my goodness.

We went org, issuer, group, badge, time for pathways. This is gonna be a bit short and sweet. Keep your copy, but don't edit. That is my hot take, my best practice for you. Generally, if you have got learners treading their way on a Canvas credential pathway, it is generally a best practice.

Don't don't edit that pathway. That has the potential to really foul things up. So if you are going to use a pathway again, right, we have a whole bunch of, like, professional development pathways that we see folks using, first year faculty or, hey, for twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four, these are the PD experiences we need you to have. And now we wanna do it for twenty four, twenty five, and most of it's gonna be the same, but a little bit will be different. Just go ahead and duplicate that pathway and and then edit the duplicate.

And you know what? I'm I gotta call myself out for a non best practice. Here is my example, Benjie's badging bandit boot camp pathway. I I I should have put a time stamp on that pathway for twenty twenty four because I know that I'm gonna do a better and bigger and some other alliterative b word pathway in twenty twenty five. And so a good idea to to to put a timestamp in the name of that pathway so that also you and your teammates, when you're looking at that list of pathways, you know what's what. And so, generally, practice, duplicate the pathway.

And, of course, I gotta mention there's the do I want to make it private or public? Is this a testing pathway that we would prefer not to have shown on our, public facing page, or is it something we do want to have on our public facing page? And finally, at long last, speaking of public facing pages, holy cow. That was quite a lot of illusion to it, but never actually doing it. And so command shift f. Yes. We're still screen sharing.

I hope Melissa will tell me if we're not. And a little live demo for you. Here, I am looking at the public facing organization page for an organization of which I am an admin. You've got to be an admin in order to do this. And I can see the issuers associated with the org.

The badge is five hundred and forty seven badges. Wow. They are getting accurate And the fifty three pathways and if you see one that you're like, oh, that is not supposed to be public. That is a testing pathway or a testing badge or a testing issuer. All three of these, you see edit visibility, and you can see, oh, look.

These were turned off. They're not visible on the organizational page even though they exist. I can turn them on. I can turn them off. So now we're gonna see Anderson College, but we will not see Canvas canon ten.

Done editing. Let's try that one more time. Done editing. Fantastic. We do see Anderson College, but we don't see Canvas canon ten.

And so it will be the exact same workflow for our badges and our pathways, making sure that this organizational page and these issuer pages and badge pages, all are exactly as we'd like it to be. Alright. Alright. Alright. Holy cow.

We're at eight thirty. Don't worry. The credentials portion is a little longer than the catalog portion. I'm gonna stop the screen share. I'm gonna check to see if I even have q and a enabled because there's a real chance that I don't and that, like, people have been waiting to ask questions.

Alright. Phew. I see that we have one question that Melissa has answered so well. Thank you, Melissa. Will a recording of this meeting be shared afterwards? Indeed.

It will. I'm gonna pause for twenty seconds, see if any questions come in. Otherwise, we're going to keep the party going with a little catalog. Oh, a question a question a question. Uh-huh.

I missed the purpose of groups. I'm gonna give a short verbal response of what are these groups and then invite folks to check out the community and reach out to their CSM so that the CSM can get in touch with me or answer the question themselves. Forgive me if I had a sip of coffee. A group, a capital g group is a thing in Canvas credentials. There's also the emotional idea of a group.

All a group is is a cohort of learners that are all gonna perhaps be doing a similar learning experience, earning similar badges, treading along similar pathways, and you just wanna put them together so you can track their progress in one visual space. It really helps both for the administrator or the instructor to see, hey. I wanna know how these learners are progressing through these badges and pathways. Or if I look at a badge sheet, how many earners have, have have awarded it? And for the learners, instead of just going about their business and they're like, oh, I earned a badge. I earned a badge.

They'll be like, oh, I'm in a group, and I can see the twelve badges to which I'm working towards and that which I need to do, in order to, earn it. And it kinda helps map out that learning experience, that learning journey for them. Great question. Great question. And if I fail to answer it, please let your CSM know, and I'm sure that they will be in my Slack DMs in no time.

Alright. Alright. Alright. I'm gonna get the screen sharing back up and running. Forgive me because it might take me a couple seconds to get all of the windows and whatnot back as I want them to be.

I gotta get my chat in the right place. I gotta get my speaker notes back up so I don't forget to say things. I've got the speaker notes back up. Do I have the chat? Where's the chat? There's the chat. It's up and running.

That's where Melissa says, hey. You're you're not totally following this up, Benjie. Keep it up. Alright. With that, I think I'm screen sharing.

I got my laser. I got my full screen. Eight thirty two. We are doing perfectly on time, folks. Yes.

You did answer one, Melissa. I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Alright. Alright. Just like with Canvas credentials with Kevin's Canvas catalog, let your CSM know who's on your catalog team so they can share those timely and relevant communications with you. Here's the guide to managing subcatalog admin access. So we have different programs and different cohorts and departments and schools or what have you, and they might have their own catalogs and subcatalogs.

Think Canvas LMS root account and subaccount. And you might need to give folks admin privileges and admin access to one or some of those catalogs and subcatalogs, but not all of them. In order to add an admin, go ahead and click on the sub catalog admin area. Of course, one must be an admin to add another admin, and you will click on here. Note that this says add sub catalog admin.

The same process for adding a root catalog admin. And if you want to add someone as an admin to multiple sub catalogs, you'll just do the process again and again as long as you need. And so we will see, for instance, Benji teacher one. They are an admin of the school of business. And one more catalog.

Clicking on this little link right here reveals an opportunity to more granularly manage those, sub catalogs, either removing them or removing Benji teacher one altogether as a sub catalog admin. So, hey, establishing your team. The people are the most important and making sure you've got them the access that they need. Next, we're gonna talk about configuring your catalog structure, and then settings, and then customizations. Big picture structure guide.

How do I manage my catalogs? Maybe just like your expanding credentialing initiative, you need an expanding catalog instance. You might need new sub catalogs for new schools, departments, programs, cohorts, what have you. In order to do that as an admin under catalogs, add a catalog. And and note to self, I wanna draw your attention to the left hand side of the screen here where we have Messemer State University. That is the root catalog instance.

That is the highest umbrella catalog under which you can have sub catalogs, like the school of business, and sub sub catalogs, like the MBA program, sub sub sub catalogs, think Canvas LMS for our Canvas LMS users in the house with your root account, sub account, sub sub account, sub sub sub account. You get it. It's a very similar structure here in catalog. With that in mind, you can also choose, hey. If someone goes to Messenger State University, the root catalog instance URL, do we want them to, by default, see everything in the school of business sub catalog? Do we want them to see everything in the MBA sub catalog? Yes or no? I leave that choice to you.

And especially if the answer to that question is no, I don't want folks to see the school of law listings if they go to Messenger State University. How do we help people see the school of law listings then? I have blurred out the URLs here, best practice, but you can grab the specific URL that will take a user directly to that sub catalog to help expedite their ability to find the learning experiences that they're looking for. Alright. So that was big picture catalog structure, catalog settings, kinda like credentials. There's a lot of them.

This is gonna be unique to you and your programming. I invite you and your team to go through setting by setting by setting and ensure that all are set up to be exactly as you'd like them to be. I will, pay specific attention to a few things. Again, this is kind of general housekeeping, not necessarily beginning of the year, but always something you wanna keep an eye on. And this pertains to the the privacy and security thing.

Right? Who would we like viewing our catalog? Maybe the answer is everyone. Anyone can view my catalog. Great. Go for it. We can have no restrictions.

But maybe it's the case that you're thinking, this particular catalog, I I really want only Instructure people to see this. This is really meant only for Instructure eyes. And so you can put a restriction on email domains and say, hey. You have to have, a Instructure dot com email account with catalog in order to access this catalog. So, I wanted to make a note of that.

A lot more toggles lower down on that screen that I just had this picture of. And, again, with the idea of access and who can and who cannot see your catalog, you can choose to say, hey. Only folks who already have accounts can see my catalog. You have to authenticate in order to access the catalog and sub catalogs. Yes or no? You can say, hey.

If we're gonna let external folks see the catalog, do we wanna let external folks also create an account via catalog where they say, hey. That's the learning experience I wanna take. Enroll, and it says, you don't have an account. Wanna make one? And they say, yes. You have the option to give them that option or not.

And then I just I just gotta draw your attention to the things that have come about in the last year. Very exciting new updates. The new storefront so you can more easily, without custom coding and whatnot, make your catalog have your branding and your images, so you can really build that brand awareness. Check out the guide on the new storefront theme editor. And user defined fields, I invite you to check out that, guide right here available at registration and or enrollment, an opportunity to gain valuable information from our users as they register and or enroll.

I wanted to draw your attention to those because they're just they're just that good. They're just that good and impactful. Hey. Let's make sure the customizations are as we'd like them to be. You can see I, and I don't really have any coding skills at all.

I like to think I made my Messenger State catalog look alright. Nothing wrong with the structure red and and gray and whatnot, but I decided that Mesinger State University is blue and white. So I wanted it to be blue and white with my logo and whatnot. So I can do that, and if I can do that, you can definitely do that. But I wanna draw your attention especially to something that might be time stamped.

You can customize the automatic emails that go out for a number of events in Canvas catalog. And one, housekeeping might as well go in and make sure they are as you welcome to be. And two, beginning of the year, if any of them are time stamped, well, let's make sure they are time stamped correctly, if that makes sense. I mentioned user defined fields previously. I'm going to is there a way to edit the names of the themes? I believe you can when you edit the theme itself.

Great question. Oh, hey. Oh, it's Jess. It's Jess. What's up, Jess? I'm giving a shout out to the user group momentarily.

I'm giving a shout out to the mo user group momentarily, so keep your eyes out for that. I think so, Jess. Jess, you also have my email, directly. So I will look into that. I believe so, but I believe there is an element of, like, once it's named, it's like copy of, copy of, copy of.

Can you customize email at the org level or sub subs? I think you can at the sub account level. I need to confirm that I'm not one hundred, one hundred percent. Great questions. Make sure to put that to your CSM. And if they don't know the answer, they will come to me, and I will either know it by then or I will find it by then.

Thank you, Jess. Thank you, anonymous attendee. Appreciate you. Alright. Alright.

Alright. We talked about user defined fields very briefly. I invite you to check out the guides on them and experiment with them. Maybe there's a chance that one of them would be time stamped. Right? So here were some examples that I made for myself in my example catalog.

One of them was, hey, you're enrolling for a course. What's your graduation year or your graduation term. And maybe one of the options was spring twenty twenty four. And I suspect that is no longer an option. So maybe something to attend to, if not in the beginning of the year, as a housekeeping item.

Tags in catalog are as we expect them to be. Tags are a way to add additional information to listings and programs to help our users users more, effectively filter, and search for learning experiences. And so to find your tags as an admin, you go click on here on tags. I'm actually not showing the tags interface there, but it's just add a tag, add a tag, add a tag, whatever you want it to be. And then the broad idea of categories, Catalogs.

Categories are saying, okay. When your user is in your Canvas catalog and they see a whole bunch of listings and there's a little jot down so that they can say, hey. Filter to show me only this. What's the this that you want them to choose from? Which of the tags that you've created here? Right? I made a whole bunch of tags, and I decided these are the seven that I would like them to be able to search and filter for specific with tags. And, of course, the sub catalogs.

If they're in the root catalog instance and they can see all of those courses, Do we or do we not want to allow them to just say, oh, I just wanna look at undergraduate business courses. I just wanna look at the school of law courses. You can choose how to empower your users to more effectively filter through those listings and programs to find the learning experiences that they wanna find. Alright. We've talked about our catalogs.

We've talked about the sub catalogs, the customizations, the settings, the categories. Now it's time for the meat and potatoes of catalog, the listings. Here we go. We're gonna have another active active slide coming up, kinda like the badges were for Canvas credentials. Here we go.

Let's manage your listings. Are we going to create new courses and new listings because we have new courses or new offerings? And or are we gonna need to make a new listing because that was the listing for last year. We need the listing for this year. And so I I want to to make a few notes here. Let's talk about new courses first.

If you wanna make a new course, rather a new listing, we go ahead and we click on add a new course. No problem. I want to make a note. If you are going to make a new Canvas catalog listing, those listings are mapped one to one with Canvas LMS courses. So if you want to make a new Canvas catalog listing, you gotta first have a Canvas LMS course ready to be mapped to it.

Does it need to be perfected, finalized, and published? No. But it just needs to exist. And so I wanted to make that note. And if I'm gonna mention making a Canvas LMS course in the beginning of the year, how can I not reference the fantastic webinar that my colleagues put on two weeks ago? Beginning of your best practices for admin, Canvas LMS, and Impact. Speaking of my fantastic my fantastic colleagues, Melissa was one of them.

Melissa was one of them. And I went to that webinar to take notes and say, if I'm gonna lead a webinar in two weeks, I'm gonna take some notes from the best. And so recording passcode and slide link there, also coming to you later. I had to make that reference because if I'm talking about making Canvas LMS courses, you gotta do it and think about it, in relation to those best practices, and tips regarding beginning of year. Okay.

That was if you're gonna make a new course. What if you're gonna keep a Canvas catalog listing? First thing to consider is, do you have the seats for it? So we've got a couple of cannabis catalog listings here, and I see, oh, seats taken six out of seven. We might need to edit that listing to increase the seat limit. Business three hundred, in this case, does not have a limit. You can see there is no fraction there.

Three seats taken, no limit, no action necessary. Employment law, ten out of ten, nobody's enrolling in that course right now unless we either remove the seat limit or increase the seat limit. Now, of course, with these business one zero one and business one zero two courses, it is the case that they're already time stamped, in their, in their name. So we're probably gonna need to make a new listing. I leave it to you to decide whether to edit that listing or to make a new one altogether.

I will I will note that, right now, there is not a copy a listing feature. Right? Just like command c, command b sort of thing. We do have to make it again from scratch. We can do some kind of piecemeal copy paste, but I do wanna make that illusion. So what if we need to actually make some updates here? How can we do that? Well, clicking on this five to expand our listings here, you'll see a couple of things.

One, are these listings enrollable at all right now? Right? Like, whether or not they're visible, are they enrollable? You can have a listing be visible. Say, hey, folks. Here's a course that you can take. You just can't enroll yet. You can enroll later, but not yet.

Is it visible right now? Is it visible at all? And so a consideration if you are not going to use a listing anymore, I would recommend perhaps making it not visible so that users who go to your catalog aren't gonna see it and aren't gonna be like, hey. Why can't I enroll? And you say you can't enroll because we're not doing that anymore. With that in mind, for you and your catalog team, as you're looking at your list of listings, which might be long, to consider a naming protocol that's really gonna help you and your team quickly visually ascertain, hey. Which are the listings that we need to attend to, and which are the ones that are no longer relevant and we do not need to attend to? So let's say you can see the visibility. That's how you can see the order of the listings.

So, hey. Which ones do we want showing up first, or later as we go from top left to bottom right as we look at the catalog array of listings? If you click on a toggle next to any of these listings and click on show actions, you can actually modify these. Of course, clicking on the listing name itself will give you into the granular editing of a listing to allow you to change anything that you would like. Is the enrollable using the self enrollment option in Canvas or the info that comes in via the SIS and student course enrollment? Is the enrollment getting self enrollment in Canvas? Enrollable in this case means isn't enrollable through Canvas catalog. Oh, versus, like, a Canvas LMS self enrollment link.

This enrollment right here is talking about Canvas catalog specifically. This, I believe, does not pertain to the self enroll link that Canvas LMS courses have deep down on the bottom of the settings page for a Canvas, LMS course. I hope that that helps answer that question. If it doesn't, please ask it again and or CSM. Great question.

Great question. I do wanna make a note. If you do not want to use a course anymore, I generally recommend hiding it. Out of sight, out of mind for your users by specifically naming it with a really thoughtful protocol, you and your team can quickly and visually ascertain, hey. What's relevant and what's not? Some folks like to delete things.

I get it because they really don't wanna see it, but I want to make a small warning here that if you were to delete a Canvas catalog listing, then any enrollment analytics associated with the course are gone. And any earned certificates for the course that learners might access on their catalog account, not available. Those are pretty heavy handed choice if one chooses to, delete them. And so, generally, we say, maybe just hide them, instead. And as a best practice, when it comes to visibility, I would recommend not making a Canvas catalog listing visible and enrollable unless it's a hundred percent ready to go.

If the listing is made and the listing is beautiful, go ahead and make it visible. When it comes to enrollable, you you probably want the Canvas LMS course behind it to be ready to rock. It's kind of a king too for our Canvas LMS users. When do you wanna press publish on the course? When it's ready to rock. When do we wanna make a Canvas l m, Canvas catalog listing visible and erodal? When it's ready to rock.

I had mentioned previously, that question about, new or keep. And so I really hope that this, really helps you think about when it's gonna be, most, relevant to do each of those. We got ten minutes on the clock. We are right on time. I'm going to once again take a twenty second pause, see if there are questions regarding Canvas catalog beyond what we've already seen.

But then do not go anywhere, please, because we've got three awesome announcements, gratitude, and then we are going to bid you adieu probably with a few minutes to spare before your top of the hour meetings, friends. Alright. Alright. Alright. Hey.

Thanks for the shout out. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Indeed. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.

Thank you. Okay. Okay. Alright. Alright.

Yes. Indeed. Alrighty. Jessica, I appreciate you talking about the user group. I am on top of it, but thank you for the note about the new time.

Alright. Alright. Alright. I am going to, absent a flood of any more questions, gonna go ahead, go back to the screen sharing, and take us home. So thank you for bearing with me as I get all of my ducks in a row again.

Alright. Alright. Do I have that? Do I have that? Alright. Let me get that chat up again. Fantastic.

Item number one. Item number one. We have an incoming Canvas catalog and Salesforce integration. This is really exciting, and we are looking for beta testers to help us with it. So, of course, I'm gonna say it verbally, but I'm also gonna put it in the chat now.

Why would one join the Canvas catalog in Salesforce beta testing? You get an exclusive first look at new features. You get to influence the development of these new features, and you get direct support from our product managers here at Instructure as we do that testing and iteration. For whom are we looking? Enthusiastic and detail oriented user to participate in this beta testing program. If you rely on catalog and Salesforce in your data daily operations, we would love to hear from you. I believe oh, the testing form didn't link.

Oh, how sad. Oh, how sad that the testing form didn't link. Oh, and now you get to watch me search for the testing form live in my beta test. There we go. Look at that.

Good thing that I had that locked and loaded. Phew. That could have been bad. Alright. Action.

There's the testing, beta tester interest form for anyone who is interested in being a beta tester. Item number two. We got Jessica Suelski in the house right now. Gotta give her and and her colleague, Jennifer White, at the University of Marymount College Park a shout out because they help organize and catalyze a bimonthly, once every other month, Canvas catalog user group. A great time to connect with other users, share experiences, tips, tricks, best practices, ideas, maybe challenges maybe challenges you're experiencing so that we can understand, hey.

Maybe a lot of folks are experiencing them or someone else has found a solution for them. They are meeting tomorrow not at two PM eastern, not at two PM eastern, but instead at ten thirty AM eastern. So please forgive me. Please forgive me. That is hot off the press.

I'm talking at eight forty nine AM local. That is three minutes ago that I got that information about ten thirty AM in the user group. I'm gonna go ahead and put some information in there in the chat. Are you interested in joining, sharing ideas, learning with and from one another? Email, that email, I t support at u m d dot e u. Mention catalog users group in the subject line, and they will get you added to the list serve and invitations.

The time that you see in front of you right now is incorrect. Incorrect. The new time is ten thirty AM eastern so that we can meet and greet the new product manager for catalog mate. He is fantastic. He is fantastic.

Thank you, Jessica. I appreciate you calling that out. Otherwise, folks would have shown up a couple hours late. Last announcement. We had a couple of beginning of your best practice webinars already.

We have one going on right now. We got one coming up next Tuesday, August six at ten AM mountain daylight time. Beginning of year best practices, learn platform webinar. Oh, once again, for whatever reason, that link did not show up in my chat message, but good thing I have it in my speaker notes. There is the link to register for that.

The beginning of year best practices for learn platform. We got some great instructor product specialist, members of my team leading that. It's gonna be really, really fantastic. And with five minutes to go before the end of the hour, it is time to infuse once more here as I try to throughout gratitude for you. Thank you for being here, friends.

I appreciate you carving time out of your busy days. Everyone has a million folks vying for their time. So for you to spend some with me, it means a whole lot. I'm gonna play some music. I'm gonna hang out for a little bit, and then we're gonna end.

Thanks so much again. Have a great day and a great upcoming year. Take care, everybody.