Support from FASE's Education Technology Office

How do I access the Quercus/Canvas test environment?

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The University of Toronto provides public access to a test server for you to use to test or experiment with Quercus tools and options. The test environment is for testing real data without affecting the production environment, such as adding users, testing course content, SIS and CSV files, and/or troubleshooting issues. This environment is intended for testing ONLY. Changes made here will not be transferred to the production environment, which is what your students access. Use this environment wisely and safely.

For more information about how the test environment works, please review Canvas' published official test environment document.

Before you use the test environment, you should know that:

  1. This environment should NEVER be shared with students. It can, however, be used across your teaching team.
  2. This environment is VOLATILE - this means that it is automatically reset completely every three weeks (on a set schedule, not by user). Your work and/or changes here will NOT be saved.

To access the Canvas/Quercus test environment, use this URL: https://utoronto.test.instructure.com/

1. Make sure you're editing the intended environment.

It is very easy to confuse the two domains - you think you're editing the production environment, but you're actually editing the test environment. Before doing any major course construction, confirm which environment you are a) working in and b) should be working in.

If you want to keep up on the latest production features in Canvas, visit the Release Notes: Canvas LMS page in the Canvas Community. Features in test mirror those in production at any given time.

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