What is TidyUP?
TidyUP from Cidi Labs is a content cleanup tool for Canvas courses. It provides a quick way to view all your course content and clean out anything that is no longer needed. You can identify and delete extra files, folders, pages, or assignments that are no longer needed to make your course easier to manage and more usable for you and your students!
How do I use TidyUP?
COLRS has put together a guide for using TidyUP as part of our Canvas Course Accessibility Process. This guide contains information on how to enable TidyUP in the course navigation, how to navigate to and through the TidyUP interface, and how to begin removing unused or duplicated files and course content.
COLRS staff has also created a video which walks instructors through the process of using TidyUP, especially as it applies to the work we want to accomplish at UIS. You can watch the video below:
Why is it important to use TidyUP on my files and Canvas content?
Broadly, TidyUP is a tool that we can use to streamline other parts of accessibility work. For files, removing unused or duplicated files ensures that accessibility efforts are focused only on files that will be used and seen by others--particularly students. This is especially important if files will be reviewed by the Digital Accessibility Remediation Team; we need to make sure that their time and resources are spent wisely.
For Canvas content, using TidyUP before scanning the course using UDOIT reduces the number of errors to work through. All content in your Canvas course--whether it's being used or not--contributes to your accessibility score. We want to be sure that all the work you're doing in UDOIT matters in that students will be seeing that content Getting rid of extraneous Canvas content will leave less work for you in future steps.
While the digital accessibility component of TidyUP is important, it's worth noting that TidyUP can help make things less confusing for both students and instructors. If there are pages, assignments, or other Canvas content that you don't mean for students to see, it can be confusing if they stumble upon those resources. Removing old assignments can also help instructors more easily navigate through their gradebooks, and deleting duplicated or unused files helps manage the Canvas file storage limit.