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.

Account-level admins have access to Canvas reports that can be used to review account data. Canvas includes a set of default reports, though other customized reports may be included for your institution. Learn about report configurations in the Canvas Default Account Reports PDF.

As an admin, you can change your account settings at any time.

You can run reports to review attendance information for a subset of the courses and students in your account. This report is sent to your email, where it can be downloaded as a CSV file.

Reports are delivered in a comma separated value (CSV) format and display all content in a list. Reports always include the following data fields: Course ID, SIS Course ID, Course Code, Course Name, Teacher ID, SIS Teacher ID, Teacher Name, Student ID, SIS Student ID, Student Name, Class Date, Attendance, and Timestamp.

Roll Call Attendance Badges are included in account reports if they were created in the account and have been assigned to students. Additionally, the badges will also only be included if they were set within the time frame you specify in the report. To view badges for reports in a subaccount, you must request the report from the subaccount. For example, if an instructor has marked a student with a badge that was created in a course or in a subaccount, the badge will not appear in the report when exported from the account.

You can generate reports for the entire course, or you can generate reports based on specific students or courses. To locate a course or student ID, view the People page, click the name of a student, and both the course and student IDs will be in the browser URL (e.g. courses/XXXXXX/users/XXX).