The University of Iowa will be implementing a content retention policy on July 1, 2026. The archiving policy helps keep ICON courses in compliance with Title II accessibility standards. Starting in April 2026, all active courses must meet accessibility standards, but archived courses do not have to meet these standards. With the archiving policy in place, instructors only need to focus on ensuring active courses are accessible and do not need to remediate archived courses. The policy starts in summer to avoid any changes during the middle of spring semester.

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

In making this policy, the team has consulted with stakeholders and legal counsel at the University of Iowa, as well as other schools that have implemented such policies, to understand our needs and what is working for other large public universities.

The archiving policy will start in July 1, 2026

A sync process will run every January 1 and July 1.

For the first year, the course will be in Active phase and nothing changes about it.

A year after a course concludes, it will be labeled Archived on the next sync cycle. The course will be in a read only state and labeled as archived, exempting it from needing to meet accessibility standards.

Instructors can still export course content, and instructors and collegiate admins will have access to a dashboard that can restore a course, pushing back delete date by one year.

Instructors can opt in to Deep Storage at any point, if they like, but that's not necessary in most cases.

Off cycle courses will fall into the same sync cycle as other courses, so off cycle courses that end before July 1 will be archived a year after they conclude on July 1, and courses that end after July 1 will be archived a year after they conclude on January 1.

Courses listed as Ongoing and Default Term are not currently part of the Course Archiving plan, and they will not be part of the archive process at this time.

The course archiving process is automatic, so instructors and departments can allow older courses to be added to the course archive process.

Courses that ended more than a year ago will be archived July 1, 2026, and their age will determine how long they are in the archive process. You can use the table below to determine a course's archive status changes.