Thursday, April 9, 2026

A new ICON course retention plan will go into effect July 1, 2026. With the new plan, ICON courses will be archived one year after they close.

This process will label older and unused content as archived. Archived content does not have to meet federal accessibility standards, so this process will help instructors meet ADA Title II regulations. Instructors only need to focus on their most recent year of courses and the upcoming semester for accessibility needs.

The content retention plan will involve a twice a year sync process. Courses will be active for one year after they close and then be added to the archive process on the next sync day. Sync days will be July 1 and January 1 each year.

In developing this process, the team consulted with stakeholders and the Office of General Counsel at the University of Iowa, as well as other schools that have implemented similar plans.

Before the archiving process, the University of Iowa had not deleted courses from ICON since the switch to Canvas in 2016, even though very few courses get viewed more than two years after they have ended.

ICON courses will follow this cycle

  • Year 1: Active. No change to enrollments or access to the course.
  • Years 2 to 5: Archive. ICON courses are labeled archived. Instructors can still copy content from these courses to new ones. These courses do not need to be remediated.
  • Year 6: Deep Storage. Access to the course is completely removed, but an ITS Help Desk ticket can be submitted to have course access restored.
  • Year 7: Deletion. ICON course is deleted.

Instructors will receive two emails notifying them a course is about to go into Deep Storage the month before it goes into Deep Storage.

Starting Tuesday, April 14, 2026, instructors and course administrators will have access to a dashboard that allows them to opt in a course to Deep Storage or delay an archived course from entering Deep Storage by one year. View the ICON course archiving webpage to learn how to opt in to early Archive.

What happens to older courses?

  • Courses from spring 2022 and earlier will be labeled as Archived for one year before going to Deep Storage.
  • Courses between spring 2025 and spring 2022 will be labeled as Archived and their Deep Storage dates will be calculated based on the year they were taught.

What about Ongoing and Default Term courses?

Courses listed as Ongoing and Default Term are not currently part of the archive process.