TidyUp is available to instructors in Canvas, and designed to help users keep their courses organized and clutter-free. It allows you to scan your course for unused or unlinked files and pages, making it easy to identify and remove unnecessary content.
With TidyUp, you can see exactly where each file is deployed within your course, manage and rename files and folders, and even mass delete outdated announcements. It also provides powerful filters to search for specific types of files, like videos, helping you streamline your course management by uploading video content in Panopto.
Adding TidyUp to Your Canvas Course
TidyUp is an instructor-only feature, and will not be visible to students. Teacher and TA users can add TidyUp to a Canvas course by using these instructions: :
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Log into your Canvas account and navigate to the course where you want to add TidyUp.
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In the course menu, scroll down and click on Settings, and then click the Navigation tab.
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Find TidyUp in the list of navigation items and click the three dots next to it. Next, select Enable. Alternatively, drag and drop TidyUp from the hidden items section to the active items section above.
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Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Save button to apply the changes.
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After saving, check your course navigation menu to ensure that TidyUp is now visible and accessible.
Review and Delete Unused/Unlinked Files
It is important to occasionally review your course Files repository to remove unused or unlinked content, and to manage redundant, outdated version of files linked throughout the course. These files could cause confusion when they are updated to a newer iteration. Reviewing files also helps avoid issues related to file and folder size limitations in Canvas storage.
Important: Before you delete any files using TidyUp, be aware that there is no way to restore deleted content. Anything selected for deletion should be carefully reviewed before clicking delete. You can attempt to retrieve an older version of the content from a previous version of the course, but it cannot be restored using TidyUp. If you are concerned about not being able to restore something you might accidentally delete, it is recommended that you make a backup of your course before deleting anything.
To Review and Delete unused content with TidyUp:
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After adding TidyUp to your course menu, click on the TidyUp tool.
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When the tool launches, click the Scan button to analyze your course content.
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Once the scan is complete, TidyUp will display a list of every single file in your course (please note: you can filter for only Unused files, but the default shows all files). For each file, it will show where it is deployed within the course, such as on specific pages or modules.
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Optional: Use the edit button to rename* files you want to rename for clarity. You can also organize files by selecting multiple files and moving them to other folders.
*This will not break the link to the file wherever it is linked in the course, but will also not change the text of the file name that was used on pages where the file was linked. - If any files are unused and no longer needed in the course, they should be deleted. If there are duplicate files, the duplication should be corrected and only one version should remain to avoid future confusion. If you'd like to retain a local copy, download the file before deleting it.
Important: Question banks cannot be scanned for file usage. Is it critical to verify files are not being used in a question bank before deleting them. If you hover over the filename for the image, TidyUp will show you a preview of the image to help you ascertain if it is still needed or not.
Review and Delete Unused Canvas Content
In the Canvas Content area within Tidyup, you can see a list of all of the pages, assignments, quizzes, announcements, and discussions from your course, and whether or not they are in use, published, etc. It is also important to review this type of content in your course and delete what is no longer needed. It can be helpful when you need to mass-delete a portion of content (i.e., if you copied a course from a previous term and need to delete all of the Announcements that copied over).
Important: Before you delete any Canvas content using TidyUp, be aware that there is no way to restore deleted content. Anything selected for deletion should be carefully reviewed before clicking delete. You can attempt to retrieve an older version of the content from a previous version of the course, but it cannot be restored using TidyUp. If you are concerned about not being able to restore something you might accidentally delete, it is recommended that you make a backup of your course before deleting anything.
To Review and Delete unused Canvas content with TidyUp:
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After adding TidyUp to your course menu, click on the TidyUp tool.
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When the tool launches, click the Scan button to analyze your course content.
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Once the scan is complete, click on the Canvas Content tab to see a report of all of the pages, assignments, quizzes, announcements, and discussions from your course. Use the filter to the right to view a specific content type.
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Optional: Use the Edit button to rename any files you want to rename for clarity.
- If any pages, assignments, or other Canvas content are unused and no longer needed in the course, they should be deleted. If there are duplicate items, the duplication should be corrected and only one version should remain to avoid future confusion.
Find and Delete Videos Uploaded directly to Canvas
At WSE, we host all course videos in Panopto. No video content should be uploaded directly to Canvas, and the school will incur a charge if this happens. If you believe you may have uploaded video content to your course in the past, it is highly recommended that you use TidyUp to scan your course for those videos and upload and embed them in your course using Panopto instead.
- After adding TidyUp to your course menu, click on the TidyUp tool.
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Click the Scan button to initiate a scan of all course files.
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Next to Filter, click the dropdown that says All, and change it to Video Files.
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TidyUp will display all video files uploaded to the course. Review the files and determine if they still need to be used in the course. If they are no longer being used, delete the files. If they are currently in use, download the video file(s) to your computer and follow the instructions to upload and embed them in your course using Panopto, and then Delete them from your Canvas Files.