TidyUP Best Practices

Our customers find TidyUP to be a straightforward and satisfying tool to use, but as you get started, there are a few best practices to become familiar with.

Encourage educators to TidyUP their courses.

Encourage educators to run the tool themselves. This helps lower the risk of content and files being accidentally deleted by someone unfamiliar with the course.

Question bank files are not recognized as "in use."

Due to Canvas limitations, TidyUP cannot recognize files associated with Classic Quiz question banks (stored inside the course) as "in use."
Make question bank files easier to recognize by:
1. Adding a standard naming convention to the beginning of the file name, such as QB.
2. Creating an unpublished page in your course and embedding any file or image associated with a question bank question so TidyUP can recognize it as "in use."
3. Create a Question Bank Files folder to store all question bank files. Then, use TidyUP's "Ignore Folder" feature to ensure TidyUP does not scan that folder, keeping your question bank files safe.

Download files before deleting them.

Always download files before deleting them with TidyUP. Downloading files with TidyUP is a precautionary measure that creates a zip archive on your computer. This ensures that if a file is accidentally deleted, it can be retrieved and added back to the course.

Run TidyUP at the beginning and end of the course.

Run TidyUP before the first day of class to clear out the clutter and make it streamlined for students. Run TidyUP again before copying the course to another semester to eliminate any clutter from tagging along.

Have UDOIT? Run TidyUP first.

If your institution has also adopted UDOIT, we recommend running TidyUP first. By clearing out old and duplicate content with TidyUP first, you can rest assured that you aren't spending time remediating content that will later be removed from the course.