Followup to "Storträffen" 20181115
A question came up about finer-grained access control for Canvas as Social has. I think that I have a partial solution as described below.
In KTH Social the choices are:
Can read
Only limit the visibility if you really have to, therefore choose an alternative as high up in the list as possible.
- Accessible to the whole world
- All users with a KTH-account may read and edit
- Students, teachers and assistants of this course can read and edit
Canvas has access control at the course level of:
- Public
- Institution
- Course
However, it turns out that one can control the accessibility to modules based upon whether a student has met a prerequisite or to those in a specific section:
-
https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/2541-module-access-to-specific-groups-sections-or-students
Links to an external site. (see Linnea Thompson
Links to an external site.'s gatekeeper approach - with Prerequisite of "gatekeeper-ignore" module)
- https://community.canvaslms.com/thread/7635 Links to an external site. using Mastery paths: https://community.canvaslms.com/people/kona@richland.edu/blog/2017/03/29/hacking-masterypaths Links to an external site.
So with the above, it is possible to have a course that has Institution level access, but restrict the access to (specific) content to students actually in the course (either by section or individually) by grouping it into a module that has a prerequisite. So it might be possible to have much of the access control of Social pages within Canvas but at the cost of a prerequisite fake assignment and use of modules to group the content that you want to restrict to a specific subset.
This seems to work with a course that is set to Public access: https://kth.instructure.com/courses/11/modules
see the "Gatekeeper module 1" which contains the assignment that does the access control and "Gatekeeper protected module 1" which is protected by this gatekeeper.
Examples of the view as seen by:
- the teacher - https://kth.instructure.com/courses/11/pages/teachers-view
- the public - https://kth.instructure.com/courses/11/pages/publics-view-of-access-controlled-page
- a test student - https://kth.instructure.com/courses/11/pages/test-students-view