Creating a Sandbox Course in Canvas (Faculty Guide)

• Why Use a Sandbox Course?
• Creating a Sandbox Course
• Maintaining Sandbox Courses
• ⚠️Storing Canvas Content
• Concluding My Course
• See Also

Why Use a Sandbox Course?

Best practice is to develop and edit all of your content in a course shell that does not have enrolled students. This is your Sandbox Course. Doing so:

• Protects your work if your course is cancelled or the course mode changes.

• Preserves your course layout, materials, and design elements.

• Allows for cleaner course copying from term to term.

• Removes student access to incomplete course content prior to the start of the term.

Upon completion of your course, you can then import your course materials into a new Sandbox so that you have the most up to date content available the next time it is offered.

Need help? Submit a request to have a Sandbox Course created.

Creating a Sandbox Course

1. Select Courses from the Global Navigation menu. Then, click on All Courses.
   
    
   
   
2. Click on the +Course button.  
3. Name your Sandbox Course using the following naming convention:
4. SANDBOX_SemesterYR_Course (ex. SANDBOX_FALL25_HUM101)
5. Click Create.

Note: If you are creating a Sandbox Course that is not associated with a specific semester, it is recommended that you name the course with the SANDBOX prefix and then a descriptive title of the content and the semester it was generated:

Example: SANDBOX_Content_FALL25

Maintaining Sandbox Courses

Using Sandbox Courses is a great way to manage your course content. In order to help manage your courses in Canvas, we recommend the following process and naming conventions to streamline your Dashboard and reduce confusion.

1. Create a Sandbox for a future course that is either (1) a course you are teaching for the first time, or (2) a course in which you plan to make significant changes to the materials (i.e. you want several distinct versions of the same course).
2. When the official Banner course (enrolled course) for the upcoming academic term becomes available, import your Sandbox content into the Banner course.
3. At the end of the academic term, copy your course content into a NEW Sandbox Course using the following naming convention:
   SANDBOX_SemesterYR_Course (ex. SANDBOX_FALL25_HUM101)
4. Delete the Sandbox Course from “Step 1” unless you are intentionally keeping old copies of the course that are distinctly different from your most recent version of the course.

⚠️Storing Canvas Content

Canvas is not meant to be a storage solution or course repository. Any Sandbox Courses older than ONE CALENDAR YEAR should be exported and saved to your computer or other backup drive. If you need the course content in the future, you will be able to import the course into a new Sandbox at that time.

Concluding My Course

In general, courses will be concluded automatically when grades are due for the term. Concluding a course does the following:

• Prevents students from accessing quizzes and submitting course activities after the course ends.
• Improves Dashboard management by removing completed courses to the Past Enrollments section.
• Instructors and students still retain access to course materials.

Once a course has concluded, access for Instructors and Students is limited to “Read Only” status. This means a course is no longer available for submitting assignments, posting discussions, uploading files, grading, or any other action-based task within the course. A full list of what instructors and students can and cannot do is outlined below. 

Instructors CAN:

• Download grades to a CSV (Excel) file
• Use as a source for copying into a new course
• Export a course
• Access material using visible navigation links 

Instructors CANNOT:

• Edit course content or grades
• View/download Analytics or item analysis within quizzes
• Send a message to the class within Canvas
• Change class access settings
• Change class navigation

Students CAN:

• View Grades and course content, including discussions and assignments
• Send a message to the instructor

Students CANNOT:

• View Quiz questions and answers
• Submit discussions, assignments, quizzes, and other course activities

Note: Please contact the Thorpe Center for further guidance if you need to extend your course beyond the grading period. For instructions on how to manage an incomplete in Canvas, follow the guidelines outlined in the End of Term Canvas Checklist (Faculty Guide).