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A course merge combines student enrollments from multiple sections into a single course environment. Merging courses saves instructors time by allowing them to administer multiple sections of a course through a single shell instead of needing to manage separate environments for multiple sections. A course merge will not merge course content; it will only merge the enrollment. It is recommended that course merge requests be submitted before building content for a course. 

In order to access Canvas, ITS must issue a @csulb.edu email account to the user.  Please note that guest accounts must be approved by an ASM or MPP.  Start the process by selecting the Guest Account Request button here.

Once approved, the guest must select the Canvas tile on  to access their account. The guest can then be manually enrolled into any course as needed. 

Organization courses can be used to create a centralized place for department staff and faculty to connect as a community, for training, staff onboarding, and other types of uses. Organization courses are similar in layout to a Canvas course but can be designed based on the goals and vision of the department or college.

Organizations will remain open indefinitely; they are not limited by semester.

Cases where Canvas Organization courses are a good fit:

• If your organization site is an academic organization that provides information, announcements, and/or surveys to participants. 
• If your organization site is a course of some sort, i.e. student orientation, professional development, job qualification or test practice, etc.
• If your organization uses any of the following features:
  • Announcements
  • Surveys or quizzes
  • Discussion boards

Cases where other platforms are more suitable

• If you would like your organization to be mainly used to store and/or share documents. Canvas course sites have limited storage, so consider these options instead:
  • Using your own external storage drive
  • Using OneDrive to store and/or share documents with colleagues.
  • Using Microsoft Teams to share and interact with group members.
  • Using SharePoint to store and share documents with your department.
  • Asking your department technical support for a folder set with user permissions on a shared drive to store and/or share documents.

Upon verification and approval by ATS, the organization will be made available to the designated leader(s).

Organization General Guidelines:

• Membership in any organization is only open to ºÚÁÏÍø students, faculty, staff, alumni, and other users already present in the MyºÚÁÏÍø Online system.
• Limited guest accounts are available and must be requested via the guest account request form.
• Organizations will be sponsored by a dean, department chair, director, or instructor member (leader), who assumes responsibility for the organization’s site including its content and activities. There will be no delegation of this responsibility to a student representative.
• Managing the organization's enrollment is the responsibility of the leaders. However, ATS can assist with bulk enrollments via an electronically generated list of campus IDs in Microsoft Excel format. The file should be emailed to canvas@csulb.edu with a 3-5 day lead time.

Manual Organization Leader Responsibilities

• Organizational leaders are responsible for maintaining and monitoring their organizations.
• Note: Anti-spam filters or incorrect email addresses could keep emails from reaching users.  As an alternative, consider using the Discussion Board or Announcements to contact organization members.
• Email messages sent to large sets of organization participants could take up to a week for delivery.

Policy Violations

All organizations are subject to the university policies and any violation may result in the removal of the organization and possible account suspension of those involved. See Student Regulations and Policies for more information. A violation of university policies by a student and employee, including faculty, in a Canvas organization, shall result in disciplinary action according to the ºÚÁÏÍø Campus Computing Policy. 

Examples of these policies are the following:

• User access to computing resources is contingent upon prudent and responsible use.
• You may not use computing resources for any illegal or proscribed act.
• You may not use computing resources for any commercial purpose without prior written authorization from the appropriate Vice President.
• You may not use any computing resource in a way that is harassing [spamming] or threatening to another individual.

Requesting a Development Course
Development Courses will appear in your Canvas Dashboard shortly after your request has been submitted. 

Description
Development (dev) courses provide a staging area to prepare your course layout and materials before copying them into your live course shells (i.e., the course you will be teaching in the next term). 

It is recommended that you use development courses to organize your course materials and layouts so you can efficiently copy them to your live courses before each semester begins.

Although live courses are typically released a few months preceding the next term, having a dev course gives you an extra cushion of time to work on course modifications well in advance.

Dev courses:

• Have no content. You can copy content from another course or build new content in a dev course.
• Contain no students; students cannot see your development course. People can be added manually and assigned different roles (students, instructors, etc.) if desired. These people can see the changes you make to the course.
• Can be populated and organized with the content you are planning to use for your Live course in the future.  When Live courses are released each semester, your content can be easily copied over.  Dev courses are great for helping you prepare in advance.
• Will remain in your Canvas account indefinitely for reuse as needed.

ATS maintains an archive of past BeachBoard courses administered from Summer 2017 through Spring 2023. Archived courses will be stored for six years (until Summer 2029).

Archived BeachBoard course data includes:

• Enrollment Information
• Student Submissions
• Discussions & Replies
• File Attachments
• Assignments
• Quizzes Data
• Feedback
• Gradebook Data

To Request Archived Data
To request student data or content from a past BeachBoard course, please submit this request:

The Canvas team will review the request and contact you promptly to coordinate the details.

Discover a wide variety of tools integrated with Canvas to enhance the teaching and learning experience: Canvas Tools, Features and Integrations.

• To request additional tools, please visit Canvas Integrations Requests for more information.