This page covers two Cornell-specific Canvas policies: 

• Canvas Use Policy
• Canvas Course Data Retention Policy

Canvas Use Policy

Canvas can be used by faculty, professional staff, and Cornell students for official classes as well as in support of academic pursuits. This includes:

• Courses officially offered at Cornell for a Cornell audience
• Academic support courses intended for Cornell faculty, staff, and students
• Public-facing, informational course sites (not requiring user enrollment)

Canvas cannot be used to create courses that are intended for external, non-Cornell audiences as well as courses designed for professional development and certificate programs. These may include:

• Conferences for external users
• Certificate programs
• Global Outreach courses
• Cornell Cooperative Extension courses
• Other restricted-use, for-fee courses for external users

Please contact the Canvas team to discuss available options.

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Canvas Data Retention Policy

Purpose and Guiding Principles

The purpose of the policy is to define a period of time to retain courses in Canvas@Cornell and achieve the following:

• To retain course sites and content for a period of time which instructors and students find adequate and useful.
• To optimize Canvas performance.
• To ensure that Canvas storage space is used efficiently within the entire Canvas@Cornell instance, and to minimize the financial and technical impact of a continuous increase in data storage.

Jump to: Data Retention Policy | What Gets Deleted | How to Retain Content | Data Retention FAQ | Schedule | Review of Policy

Canvas Data Retention Policy Statement

Content created in Canvas@Cornell is retained for five years after the end of the academic year in which the course was offered. When the retention period passes, a Canvas course is flagged for deletion. Flagged courses will be permanently deleted from the vendor’s servers within a year.

For example, a course offered in Fall 2019 will be flagged and deleted starting in August of 2025.

The automatic deletion will be applied to all courses created through automatic integration with the registrar’s courses of record (i.e. all courses in the Course Catalog, with the exception of independent student [IND] and research courses [RSC] which are not automatically created in Canvas.

Any Sandbox courses or Perpetual term courses created for organizational or committee use would not be flagged for automatic course deletion. Retention of course materials and student data that use other services linked through Canvas such as Kaltura, Panopto, Turnitin, etc. would be determined by the retention policy set for that specific service.

Courses will not be automatically backed-up prior to deletion. Courses with approaching Canvas deletions will be marked as such on the  All Courses page, with pending deletion added to the course name (i.e. “Pending Deletion MATH 1100”).

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What Gets Deleted

All course content and user participation will be deleted five years after the close of a course. Deleted content will include the content stored under the following sections of Canvas: 

• Syllabi
• Course Descriptions
• Modules
• Course Announcements
• Digital Materials (Files)
• Media (uploaded directly to Canvas)
• Course Pages
• Course Discussions
• Course Assignments and Quizzes
• Rubrics
• Grading, including: Submissions, SpeedGrader Comments, and Grades
• Correspondence (Inbox)

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How to Retain Content

Courses will not be automatically backed-up prior to deletion.

If you would like to retain course materials, we recommend that you do the following at the end of each academic year or each semester:

• Export Canvas course without student enrollment and submissions

If you need to download student work, grades, and grading comments:

• How do I export grades in the Gradebook?
• How do I download all student submissions for an assignment in the Gradebook?
• How do I download submission comments as a PDF in SpeedGrader?

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Data Retention FAQ

Below are some common questions and answers for instructors, students, and alumni. 

We know you may have more questions about the policy itself, the specific content that will be deleted from Canvas, how to retain your content, and more. Please do not hesitate to contact CTI or our Canvas team with any follow-up or additional concerns you may have.

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Schedule

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Review of Policy

This policy will be reviewed annually, as well as at other times as needed. Faculty will be notified of any changes. Please write to canvas@cornell.edu with any questions or concerns.

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