TidyUP
What is it?
TidyUP by Cidi Labs is a Canvas course cleanup tool that helps instructors and designers identify and remove unused files, duplicate items, and empty folders from Canvas. Removing unneeded content from a Canvas course helps instructors focus their accessibility efforts on materials that students actually use. This reduces the time spent remediating unnecessary content and makes the path to Title II compliance more efficient.
TidyUP is more than just a cleanup tool. It easily allows instructors to view and filter by metrics for their course files, including date created, date updated, file size, publishing status, path, and locations used. All or selected files can be zipped and exported as local backups prior to deletion.
How to Access
TidyUP can be accessed by selecting TidyUP in the Canvas course navigation menu. If the TidyUP link is not currently available, you can add TidyUP to the course menu opens a new website.
FAQ
TidyUP scans every item in your Canvas course and notes creation date, update date, size, publishing status, if the content is linked in a module, if the content is assigned to students, and if the content is linked or embedded in other locations in the course. This information can be accessed by going to TidyUP in the course menu. Using this information, TidyUP marks as ‘unused’ Canvas items that are:
- not part of Modules or not assigned
- empty folders
- duplicate pages or files
- feedback on student submissions
We recommend that TidyUP be used before students submit assignments to avoid potentially losing feedback.
TidyUP will allow you to backup all files in your course and then bulk delete all unused items or only selected items from the course.
TidyUP does not automatically delete files. Only content the instructor directs TidyUP to delete will be deleted. Please use the built-in file export backup functionality to preserve a local copy of your content before deleting anything.
TidyUP can scan files when they are in a Canvas Classic Quiz opens a new website but cannot scan files from question banks, New Quizzes, or item banks. If you have embedded files in your Quiz questions (e.g., an image that a quiz question refers to), make sure to export a backup of your files with TidyUP before deleting, and check quiz questions with embedded content after cleaning up.
Cidi Labs recommends downloading a zip file of all course files before beginning deletion as part of their best practices when using TidyUP.