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Create a Sandbox Course

A sandbox is an empty course shell created in Canvas for all faculty. It is intended to allow faculty the opportunity to play around and get familiar with the features of Canvas without the fear of causing any harm to their live courses. It can also be used to create a "master course" to get a head start building courses that have not yet been created.

If you have not received a sandbox or need an additional sandbox, fill out this Create a New Sandbox Request form. This will auto-generate a new sandbox for you immediately.

Content Storage

All Canvas courses, including sandboxed and organization, have a storage limit of 2 GB per course.

IMPORTANT: The sandbox should not be used as a storage repository for content.

Faculty should be using Kaltura for audio and videos and Google Drive for large files and images and then embedding or linking them to their Canvas courses.

Storing Files

Canvas works the best when you make the most of the built-in Pages, so for word documents and other non-copyrighted files, consider copying and pasting the information into a Canvas Page. This will also save you some storage space for more important files in your Canvas Files.

Large documents, images, powerpoints with images and videos should go into Google Drive & Apps.

A Google Drive icon now appears in the Rich Content Editor. The icon displays everything in a user’s Google Drive account and allows users to display documents as inline links or embed them directly. Students and teachers can view the icon anywhere they can access the Rich Content Editor, such as assignments, tests, discussions and pages. (If the icon is not displayed, click the ? icon for the More External Tools drop-down menu to see it.)
Google Apps_Rich Content Editor

Storing Videos

Video files can take up a lot of space in your Files and will not have captions unless you are using a streaming platform like Kaltura. If you have files of videos you’ve recorded, it is highly recommended that you upload your videos to Kaltura and embed your videos into your Canvas course.

For more information, see the Canvas Tip: Uploading Videos and Large Files blog post and be sure to subscribe for live updates.

Support

If you have questions or need help regarding content imports that exceed the course size limitation (2GB), contact VCU Online for a consultation. 

VCU Online Expanded Open Office Hours for Faculty
Join VCU Online during their "Open Office Hours" for faculty. Drop in to get help, ask questions, or just brainstorm about topics related to Canvas