Creating ONA Model Courses in the Canvas Commons

All Online Accelerated (ONA) courses are built by contracted course designers in "Model" courses. Once a Model course has been completed and passed the Course Review process, Instructional Technology and Web Services (ITWS) will share the course into the Canvas Commons into a department-specific Group. This document aims to outline the fundamental steps involved in this process and provide clarity to participating departments.

Course Development

For a new ONA course being developed, a department requests that ITWS build a Model (manually-created) course, if one does not already exist in Canvas. This request may be sent as an email to instructionaltech@ewu.edu.
The course developer is added as the Teacher, TA, or Designer, depending on the needs of the department.
Once course development is complete, the course is sent to ITWS for review.
When the course has been approved and all content (including transcripts of captions) is complete in the Model course, ITWS copies the course to the appropriate pre-defined "Group" in Commons.
Groups are a tool for organizing content and users in Commons. Groups are defined by ITWS and can be added/modified as needed for best practices. Some examples of Groups in Canvas Commons:
- Accelerated-ACCT
- Accelerated-BADM
- Accelerated-EDUC

Import from a Model Commons

Instructors must be in the appropriate Group in Commons before they will be able to copy courses or content from that Group.
Groups and Users in Commons are maintained by the corresponding department, and they will need to add any new instructors to the appropriate Group in Commons.
Instructor enrollment for term courses comes into Canvas from Banner; ITWS does not manually add instructors to term courses.
Before the start of a new term, instructors import Commons Model course(s) into their term course(s).
Instructors update the Model content in their term courses as needed - Syllabus, Faculty page, etc. No other major changes should be made to the approved Model content.
If significant changes are made to Model content, a course may need to be resubmitted for a Course Review. Department/Program leads will be responsible for managing that process.
If an existing Model course has been modified, re-submitted for review, and has passed the review, then ITWS will copy the updated course into Commons, replacing the original Model course.