More irrelevant files makes it more difficult for faculty (and students when the files section is visible) to find relevant content.

Old irrelevant files in courses in the files section are problematic for a number of reasons: In other words, over 67% of the files in those courses were no longer being used! Given that some instructors choose to make the files section visible to students we filtered out that data to determine what percentage of files were being used.įrom that data we found that only 32.7% of the files in those courses were being used. We brought the problem to our data analyst who was able to use Canvas Data to look at data on every file across our courses and determine whether there was a link to that file or not from the Canvas content. Up until recently there was no way to identify which files were being used or not. syllabus-2011.pdf) or files from past years or duplicate files that were never used. Some of those irrelevant files are past syllabi (i.e. We have been using Canvas since the Summer of 2011 and one of the challenges is the accumulation of significant amounts of unnecessary and unused files in the files section as courses are copied forward.

The Problem with Unused, Irrelevant Files This tool is now available as a commercial (but affordable!) product: Read below about a tool we have built to to solve these problems at Utah State University. Have you ever wanted the ability to know which files from the Canvas Files section are being used in course content or where they are being used? How about the ability to identify and delete unused, irrelevant files?

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