Canvas shells are blank Canvas courses in which you can create and deliver course content. Think of them as blank “canvases” for instructors and course designers to use as a sandbox for experimentation or to house supplemental content.
If you’re in need of a Canvas course, it’s important to understand the types of courses that you can request because there are several for different purposes. Here are your options:
- Sandbox – Like the name implies, sandboxes are essentially courses used to experiment with Canvas content. These are not student or learner-facing courses but instead are for building and testing. If you build something in a sandbox that you would like to use in your student-facing course, you can import the content with a few clicks of a button.
- Continuing Studies/Lifelong Learning (L3) – UW–Madison offers hundreds of courses each year to non-traditional students. For everything from pre-college to post-college to continuing education, Continuing Studies and Lifelong Learning course shells are for external audiences.
- Compliance/Institutional Training – We’ve all taken Cybersecurity training before. Maybe you’ve also taken FERPA training, HIPAA, or Title IV training. These are examples of Compliance and Institutional training courses in Canvas. If you are using Canvas to deliver training to students, employees, or both, this is the type of course shell you need.
- Supplemental – Sometimes for-credit courses and programs need a place to house additional content–a place where students can access support and interact with others. This is where supplemental course shells come in. Supplemental course shells are used to house content that is tangential to for-credit courses.
- Blueprint – Blueprints are unlike any other course shell in Canvas. They are unique because a single blueprint can share the same content with multiple Canvas courses. We can also lock content within the blueprint so it cannot be changed in downstream associate courses. These course shells are rare because they are used only in situations where multiple copies of the same course are used within a short amount of time. Plus, only administrators can sync the content across the associated courses.
Want your own course shell? You can request one using the Canvas Course Request form. Requests take approximately 3-4 days to be fulfilled. If you have questions about requesting a Canvas course shell, or need assistance doing so, please contact the DoIT Help Desk.