Oops!?! … “undelete” CTRL+Z Cancel and IDs to the rescue!
Thanks to Eric French, Steven Cain, and Jillian Manzer for helping compile and support these tips!
I know it has happened to you… you are working along on your course site prep and all of a sudden, you mess something up! Or you experience what I did yesterday, where you are teaching 97 students in a five-week term, and realize in the last couple of days of the term that the grade book is not calculating correctly! (Three video calls to Steven later, all is good!)
Canvas provides plenty of opportunities for you to enhance the quality of your students’ experiences in the online aspects of your course. But there are also many opportunities for you to make a mess — especially if you are working with DesignPLUS without much experience. DesignPLUS is a great tool for helping you build things in Canvas in a hurry, but the flip side is that it can also help you break things in a hurry. It is common to make an error in Canvas (delete something on accident, ruin the formatting of a page template, etc.) and then spend hours of precious time trying to fix it. Fortunately, there are many ways to undo errors in Canvas, but few people know about all of these.
Below are options you can explore whenever you have made a mistake that you need to fix. Before reviewing these, however, keep this cardinal rule in mind: Never embark on an extensive effort to fix something without first reaching out to an instructional designer to see if they can help. In most (but not all) cases, they can fix the problem for you in a matter of minutes — or perhaps direct you to someone else for a simple fix. When this is not possible, they can still let you know what your options are so you can decide how to proceed.
If you want to shop for a quick remedy before seeking help, then here are the most common troubleshooting options at your disposal:
Undelete
Try the “undelete” option. In some cases, such as when you have accidentally deleted a quiz or assignment, the solution you need is hidden in a lesser-known area of Canvas — the “undelete” page. This is like the Recycle Bin of your Canvas course: a place where the last 25 deleted items go before being removed permanently. Simply replace the end of any Canvas course URL with the word “undelete” like this:
This will take you to a page where you can find a list of items to be restored.
If you click the Restore button, it will return that item to your course, in the location where it used to live before you deleted it. Note that if you restore a quiz or assignment with student responses, it may take a little time before all results are restored.
CTRL+Z
If you are working in the Rich Text Editor in Canvas, you may be able to simply undo what you just did! If you have just made the error, press CTRL+Z (or command + Z on a Mac) and see if what you are working on returns to normal.
Cancel
If you are editing a page in Canvas and you have made an error, consider simply hitting “Cancel” at the bottom of the page. If this would not cause you to lose much work, then just cancel your edits and begin them again. To make this option work better, save your edits frequently! If you are doing extensive work on a particular page, save your progress (and then re-enter the edit screen) every five minutes or so. If you do this, then you can simply hit “Cancel” when you make a large error, and you will never lose more than a few minutes of work.
Other options
When working on a page in Canvas, you can restore a previous version of the page, if needed. When you click on “View Page History” a list of previous versions will appear. These are all of the most recent instances in which you have saved changes to that page. Click on any of the items on that list to see what the page looked like at that time. If you want to return the page to one of these states, click on “Restore this revision” while viewing that prior version of the page.
Import a previous version. Imagine you are working on your syllabus in Canvas. Unfortunately, this feature of Canvas does not have an option to restore a previous version, so mistakes you make are locked in once you hit “Save.” But if you have a previous version of your syllabus (from having taught the same course, or a similar one, before), consider importing the older version into your course as a way of rolling back changes. For example, if you previously imported your full course from a prior semester, and you subsequently attempt to bring in a syllabus template from DesignPLUS, it will overwrite whatever was previously in the Syllabus area of your course. If you want to undo this (after already hitting “Save” while inserting the template), you could import only the syllabus from that earlier course. You can do the same with any item in Canvas (assignment, quiz, page, etc.) that your edits have left in worse shape than when you started. To copy individual items from another course, perform the course copy in exactly the same way as you did when bringing in the full course, but instead select “Import Selected Content.” Once you hit “Import,” you will select which item(s) you want to import from this other course.
Remove and add content blocks in DesignPLUS. Formatting problems often arise when using a DesignPLUS template — such as the College of Business syllabus template or other such templates available to instructors in the College. Unless you are a highly-experienced user of DesignPLUS, it is typically best in these cases to contact an instructional designer so they can fix the problem. They work extensively with these templates, so they will probably be aware of an easy fix. Before contacting them, however, one relatively straightforward option you could consider is to remove or add content blocks.
Most of the templates we use in the College of Business contain multiple pre-populated section headings, complete with custom formatting. If something has gone wrong with one of these, often the best fix is simply to copy any text that you want to keep from the ill-formatted section, delete the entire section, and then add it again. When you do this, it will re-insert the section as it existed before you began editing it. You can then paste your copied text back into this new, properly-formatted section.
Reset your course and start over. If a major error happens early in the process of working in your Canvas site, you can simply reset the Canvas site completely. This will wipe out everything in the course and restore it to its blank condition. For instance, if you attempt to perform a course copy, but you accidentally select the wrong course to copy, you are not locked into that choice. Just reset the course and attempt the course import again. While this is not typically the solution a person needs, it may help to know that nothing you do in your course site needs to be permanent. If you are making major changes to a live course (which it will not work to reset), consider making these in a Canvas sandbox and simply importing the items into the actual course once you have everything the way you want it. The stakes are lower in a sandbox, which can always be adjusted and reset without any risk of impacting students.
