Canvas Policies

Learning Management System Policy

Scope

Canvas is the Learning Management System (LMS) provided as a service by Instructure, a third-party vendor, and administered by the University of North Texas (UNT or University) Enterprise Systems LMS Support Team which is responsible for its implementation, daily operations, support, and security. This policy applies to all UNT faculty, staff, students, vendors, and others who use UNT’s implementation of the LMS for any purpose.

Privacy

UNT provides this written procedure for protecting the privacy of students in distance education courses or programs. In addition to the information provided below regarding the terms of privacy for the LMS, the University Acceptable Use Policy (14.003) and Privacy Policy (14.009) provide relevant information on protecting the privacy of all University students including those enrolled in distance education courses and programs.

Students are strongly encouraged to take measures to protect their privacy online. For example, when accessing UNT computing resources via a public computer, students should avoid saving passwords which might be easily viewable by subsequent users and clear the browser cache when a computing session is complete. General resources on topics such as passwords, securing workstations, and other security practices are located at the UNT System Information Security web site.

Restrictions on Use

The LMS and integrated technologies are funded by educational fees and thus are permitted to be used solely for credit courses listed in EIS, university-wide new student orientation, placement tests, graduate student qualifying or comprehensive exams from which those fees are generated.  All training courses for employees including student employees must be administered through the Bridge platform. For other needs, there are other additional options available for non-course related requests. All other requests must be approved by the Executive Director of Enterprise Systems or the Chief Information Officer.  Your use of the LMS is also governed by Instructure’s Terms of Use.

Access

All University faculty, staff, and students are automatically provided accounts to access this LMS as soon as their employment and/or student application is officially completed. Due to potential FERPA, IT Security, intellectual property, and contractual agreement violations, we are unable to provide LMS course access to non-UNT persons. If you provide certification courses sponsored by the University to users not affiliated with the University, those non-UNT students must register for their courses via CampusCE. Access may expire for faculty, staff, and students immediately after their separation from the university in accordance with UNT Policy 14.003, Acceptable Use. 

UNT Courses & Student Access

All UNT courses with at least one (1) student enrolled will automatically be populated in the LMS ninety (90) days prior to the start of each term. Instructors are added to courses as soon as they are listed as the instructor of record in EIS. Students enrolled in courses are uploaded one (1) week prior to the start of the term, will gain access to courses as soon as they are published by the instructor, and will retain access until one (1) week after the term ends unless the instructor has altered the course start and end dates in the course settings. Any student who drops or withdraws their enrollment from courses will be marked inactive in those respective courses.

Merging/Combining Courses

All requests to have multiple courses combined into one for the convenience of the instructor must be made prior to the start of the term to ensure student data integrity.

Responsibility for Content

Content that you create and upload to the LMS is subject to UNT intellectual property policies. You are responsible for complying with all federal and state laws, UNT Regent Rules, UNT Regulations, and UNT System and Institutional policies. Course materials may be used as intended by the instructors, otherwise you may not copy, sell, license, transfer, distribute, or otherwise use or exploit the LMS or any materials on the site other than your own content. Online and hybrid course materials must be approved by DSI CLEAR to ensure the content complies with all laws, regulations, rules, and policies. For more information about the online approval process, please visit the Online Course Development Services web page.

Student Data & Retention

The University requires all student-graded work be stored for one (1) calendar year after the end of the term as outlined in UNT Retention Policy 7.1.319. Other retention policies pertaining to information in the LMS with longer retention periods such as syllabi, content, and grade books (UNT Retention Policy 7.2.593 and 7.2.108) can be found at the UNT System Records Retention web site. Canvas courses are subject to deletion after the expiration of the content retention period.    

 

Third Party Tool Integrations

Enterprise Systems LMS Support Team administers multiple third party tool integrations within the LMS. These technologies can be found at the Supported Technologies web site.  For a new technology to be integrated into the LMS, it first must go through several review processes, including IT compliance, accessibility, privacy, support resources, and cost.

System Maintenance, Outages and Upgrades

Instructure performs maintenance on the LMS every 1st and 3rd Thursday of the month from 1:05am to 3:05am if necessary. Although the maintenance windows are scheduled for two (2) hours, maintenance is not always performed and downtime is not expected to last longer a few minutes but could last the full two (2) hours. The LMS Support team will notify users via Canvas announcement if downtime is expected or if maintenance is expected to last longer than the allotted time. Notification of any unplanned outages or downgraded performance shall be at the discretion of the LMS Support team based on the severity of impact to users as outlined in the LMS outage procedure.

Exceptions

Exceptions to these policy may be requested in writing to lms@unt.edu, which will be forwarded to the Executive Director for Enterprise Systems.