Conversations is the messaging tool used instead of email to communicate with a course, a group, an individual student, or a group of students. You can communicate with other people in your course at any time.

Each Canvas account displays a default Canvas theme. As an admin, you can create and manage themes designed specifically for your institution.

Custom branding is hosted at the account level, and by default, sub-accounts and their associated courses inherit account branding. However, you can enable sub-accounts to use the Theme Editor; any elements that are not specifically changed will still be inherited by the account level.

To learn how theme branding is displayed for courses vs user data, learn how to create a theme for an account.

Note: If you are a sub-account admin and the Themes link is not visible in Account Navigation, Themes has not been enabled for sub-accounts.

In the test environment, you can test using your real data without messing up your live production environment. Here you can add users, test course content, and/or troubleshoot issues without ruining the experience for your users. The test environment is overwritten with data from the production environment every three weeks. You can configure your test environment with production-ready features, such as access to your institution's login authentication system.

If you want to keep up on the latest production features in Canvas, visit the Release Notes page in the Canvas Community.

The test environment is separate from the beta environment, which is overwritten with data from the production environment every week and allows you to explore new features before they reach production. Learn more about the different Canvas environments.  

Notes about the Test Environment:

• All users can access the Canvas test environment, but students cannot access course content beyond the Course Home Page; if you want to allow students to view all course content, please contact your local Admin.
• Notifications, including course invitations and report downloads, cannot be sent in the test environment.
• Crocodoc (annotation tool in SpeedGrader) 
is not available in the test environment.
• Any changes you want to keep in the test environment must be made directly within the production environment in order to affect live data.
• LTI tools (External Apps) are typically not available in the outside the production environment. LTI tools may display in the test environment, but often they are only configured for the production environment. Using production-configured LTI tools in the beta environment will affect live data. If you have permission to edit LTI tools, you can confirm the configuration for a specific LTI tool in your course or account. Please contact your Customer Success Manager for specific questions.
• Feature option settings are never copied from production and always retain their default settings.

Student Information System (SIS) Imports are a great way to manually import bulk data (or changes) into the Canvas system. This lesson will provide the basic lessons on how to use the Canvas API and the programming language of your choice to set up an automated system to manage your SIS import workflow.

Several programming languages can be used to build an automated integration tool with Canvas. If your preferred programming language can make Secure Socket Layer (SSL) web calls (HTTPS) to an external server and has the ability to post files, you can apply the steps in this lesson to the programming language of your choice (or just install cURL and write a batch file). This lesson provides a simple approach to setting up a basic automated import system. However, you may want to develop a more complex system based on your skills and the abilities of your specific SIS integration.

Testing Data Integrations

To avoid affecting data in your production environment, you may want to set up your SIS integration in your test environment for accurate testing. Every three weeks, the day after a new Canvas production release, your production environment will create an updated copy for your test environment so you can test with up-to-date data. Once you have confirmed your data works correctly, you can re-apply your SIS integration to your production environment.

Alternatively, you can create your changes in your production environment, then wait for the next refresh before you begin practicing in your test environment.

Advanced Help

• Canvas Community Migrations and Integrations Group
• Canvas API Documentation
• SIS Imports via Canvas API (automated)
• SIS Imports via Canvas UI (manual)