We aren't quite ready to create users and courses on Biola's Canvas site yet. It might not be until the first part of August. I know many of you are anxious to get started, so I want to keep you informed of our progress:
Although we'd love to create all the users and classes right now, we need to make sure we get all of the underlying structure and naming conventions right (Course name, Course ID, CRN number, SIS Unique ID, User ID, Net ID, primary email, etc., etc.), so that Canvas will connect well with Banner (the Registrar's official enrollment data) so that courses and enrollments can all be created and updated as automatically as possible.
We had another productive meeting with the Canvas people this morning in which we learned more about some standard best-practices ways to set all of this up. And we're going to attend a special training session for system administrators on Thursday in which we'll learn even more.
Another complication is that courses in Canvas are associated with specific department accounts and sub-accounts. In the long run, this gives us quite a bit of flexibility in letting department chairs, secretaries, deans, and others have more control and oversight of courses that are in their specific area. It will also really help with organizing university-wide learning outcomes. But this also means we need to plan carefully how to set up that structure correctly from the beginning. (In Blackboard there was no such structure - all classes were just one big collection - we couldn't give Jerrianne Smith access to just the math classes, for example).
Meanwhile, if you're really anxious to get started developing a course on Canvas before mid-August, you can always get started by using the free trial version (https://canvas.instructure.com/login) temporarily and then later, once we have our act together, you'll be able to copy your course from there to Biola's Canvas (which is at https://biola.instructure.com/login for now, but may eventually be at http://canvas.biola.edu - so don't bookmark anything yet). We've tested this copy process, and it's straightforward. You'll need to export from the free version, save the ZIP file on your computer, then upload that into your official Biola course once it's ready. We'll provide detailed instructions, but we might not have time to do it for everyone. Developing a course on this trial version will let you get started, but students won't have access until it's been copied to Biola's Canvas.
Reminder: We're still suggesting that most classes should be run on Blackboard for Fall 2013, and that most instructors plan on using Canvas for courses starting Spring 2014.