{"schema_version":1,"research_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp04_external_evaluation_20260802","source_assessment_id":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management__education_pedagogy:PROPOSAL_FIRST:v0","cell_id":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management__education_pedagogy","search_queries":["site:community.canvaslms.com course copy outdated content links course audit instructor","LMS course copy old outdated content student confusion research","university course design checklist remove outdated content LMS official","Canvas LMS course link validator course copy official documentation","site:instructure.com blueprint courses sync content official Canvas documentation","site:community.canvaslms.com \"course copy\" \"outdated\" content","learning management system course organization student confusion cognitive load study primary research","official university records retention LMS course content grade appeal accessibility records","Canvas LMS unused files duplicate content cleanup product TidyUP official","LMS course content inventory stale content review product","learning content lifecycle management version expiration review date software education","Canvas course content archival restore recycle bin official","site:eric.ed.gov online course organization navigation student satisfaction performance LMS study","site:pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov LMS course structure confusion students qualitative study","course design consistency LMS student performance primary study navigation","online course organization cognitive load student performance dissertation Wilder results","\"Postgraduate Students’ Experience of Using a Learning Management System\" publisher full text","doi postgraduate students experience learning management system support learning qualitative descriptive study"],"sources":[{"source_id":"S1","title":"Declutter your Learn.UQ course checklist","publisher":"University of Queensland","url":"https://elearning.uq.edu.au/projects/ultra-courses-activation-project/declutter-your-learnuq-course-checklist","source_class":"OFFICIAL_GUIDANCE","publication_date":"Undated; page references the 2025 Ultra activation project","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["UQ recommends reviewing and deleting unused LMS content because accumulated content makes a course site less manageable.","UQ advises obtaining access to a previous course iteration to identify outdated current-site content with confidence.","The course coordinator or, failing that, the head of school is an identifiable approval path for access to prior iterations.","UQ recommends limiting folder depth because deeply buried materials are harder for students to find."]},{"source_id":"S2","title":"Course Data Purge Process","publisher":"Michigan State University","url":"https://help.d2l.msu.edu/d2l-retention/d2l-data-purge","source_class":"OFFICIAL_GUIDANCE","publication_date":"Undated","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["MSU states that its D2L environment accumulates outdated or irrelevant courses and materials because of curriculum changes, turnover, and concluded courses.","MSU identifies clutter, navigation difficulty, obsolete information, storage, performance, and data accuracy as reasons for an annual purge.","MSU IT is an identifiable institutional adopter and authorizer operating a four-year course-retention process with advance notice and export opportunities."]},{"source_id":"S3","title":"Postgraduate Students’ Experience of Using a Learning Management System to Support Their Learning: A Qualitative Descriptive Study","publisher":"SAGE Open Nursing","url":"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/23779608211054817","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2021","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["Two focus groups involving eight postgraduate nursing students found frustration, navigation difficulty, and difficulty finding important information distributed across LMS locations.","Participants reported that a clearer course structure reduced time and effort needed to find materials and improved overview.","The study was small and context-specific, so it supports the importance of coherent LMS structure but does not quantify the prevalence or effects of stale copied scaffolds."]},{"source_id":"S4","title":"How do I validate links in a course?","publisher":"Instructure","url":"https://community.instructure.com/en/kb/articles/661141-how-do-i-validate-links-in-a-course","source_class":"OFFICIAL_PRODUCT_DOCUMENTATION","publication_date":"Undated; current documentation","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["Canvas already scans published and unpublished course content for invalid, unresponsive, and deleted-content links.","The validator identifies a narrow class of stale dependencies but can falsely flag working external links that block automated access.","Existing link validation is a comparator and technical building block, not a semantic-currentness or retention-authority system."]},{"source_id":"S5","title":"TidyUP","publisher":"Virginia Commonwealth University","url":"https://digitalaccessibility.vcu.edu/canvas-lms-courses/tidyup/","source_class":"OFFICIAL_GUIDANCE","publication_date":"2025-07-16","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["VCU deploys TidyUP to scan Canvas courses and identify, organize, modify, and delete unused files, content, and folders.","TidyUP identifies blank, unpublished, and unassigned content and shows publication and module-use status.","VCU warns that deletion is permanent and advises downloading needed material first, exposing a recoverability gap relevant to quarantine and archival controls.","TidyUP is close prior art for course-level inventory and cleanup, although the documented workflow lacks cross-generation provenance, semantic staleness, retention holds, and dependency-gated disposition."]},{"source_id":"S6","title":"Course Content Distribution Comparison","publisher":"Instructure","url":"https://community.instructure.com/en/kb/articles/387051-course-content-distribution-comparison","source_class":"OFFICIAL_PRODUCT_DOCUMENTATION","publication_date":"Undated; current documentation","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["Canvas Blueprint Courses, Commons, and course templates already distribute, copy, update, lock, and synchronize course content.","Blueprint courses are maintained by administrators, instructional designers, or authorized instructors, establishing credible workflow roles.","Documented limitations include large management time, overwritten local changes, difficulty tracking Commons updates, template changes applying only to new courses, and lack of association between copied template content and its source.","These tools are strong comparators but do not document artifact-level expiry, exception registers, quarantine, or restore testing."]},{"source_id":"S7","title":"Grades and Records of Student Performance — Academic Policy 1480.10","publisher":"University of Arkansas","url":"https://policies.uark.edu/academic/148010.php","source_class":"OFFICIAL_ORGANIZATION_DATA","publication_date":"2023-08-22","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["Instructors must retain grade-evaluation records and materials for two years, and departments assume responsibility when instructors leave.","The university requires preservation of LMS course materials to institutional storage after each semester and deletes LMS courses older than two years.","Student records must be handled consistently with FERPA, demonstrating that course-content cleanup must distinguish ordinary instructional supports from protected educational records.","Institution-specific retention policies constrain universal expiry defaults and require records authority participation."]},{"source_id":"S8","title":"Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics: Instructional Coordinators","publisher":"U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics","url":"https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes259031.htm","source_class":"GOVERNMENT_OR_REGULATOR","publication_date":"2023-05","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["The May 2023 mean wage for instructional coordinators in colleges, universities, and professional schools was $35.81 per hour or $74,480 annually.","The wage benchmark supports resource-equivalent labor estimates but does not supply vendor, integration, hosting, legal-review, or 2026 inflation costs."]}],"problem_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"The problem class is visible: UQ explicitly tells staff to remove unused content and consult prior iterations to identify outdated material; MSU reports accumulation, clutter, navigation difficulty, and obsolete information; and primary research documents student frustration and findability problems. However, no retrieved source measures how often copied course scaffolds specifically contradict current assessments or accommodations, or quantifies resulting learning, equity, or staff-time harm.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3"]},"stakeholder_evidence":{"support":"STRONG","rationale":"Identifiable institutional actors are already acting: UQ supplies a course-coordinator/head-of-school approval path for prior-course access, MSU IT runs lifecycle purges, VCU provides an instructor cleanup tool, Canvas assigns Blueprint management to administrators and instructional designers, and Arkansas assigns preservation duties to instructors and departments. This is strong expressed operational need, although no institution was found requesting the complete proposed registry.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S5","S6","S7"]},"prior_art":{"proximity":"ADJACENT_PRIOR_ART","closest_analogues":[{"name":"Pre-term manual decluttering using previous course iterations","similarity":"Reviews accumulated LMS content, uses a previous offering as context, and deletes outdated or unused material.","remaining_difference":"No documented artifact identity, explicit lifecycle states, dependency graph, exception register, quarantine, or archive-restore test.","source_ids":["S1"]},{"name":"Canvas Course Link Validator","similarity":"Scans published and unpublished content and surfaces broken, deleted, or unreachable references.","remaining_difference":"Checks link reachability rather than semantic staleness, ownership, assessment/accessibility dependencies, retention authority, or disposition state.","source_ids":["S4"]},{"name":"TidyUP for Canvas","similarity":"Creates a course-level cleanup view of unused, blank, unpublished, and unassigned artifacts and permits bulk cleanup.","remaining_difference":"The documented workflow is single-course and usage-state oriented; deletion is permanent, and no cross-generation provenance, semantic contradiction detection, policy holds, or reversible quarantine is documented.","source_ids":["S5"]},{"name":"Canvas Blueprint Courses, Commons, and course templates","similarity":"Manage reuse, copying, locking, updates, and centralized control of course content across shells and terms.","remaining_difference":"They distribute current content but do not provide a documented lifecycle registry for locally accumulated scaffolds; copied templates can lose source association, updates can overwrite changes, and Commons updates can be difficult to track.","source_ids":["S6"]},{"name":"Institutional LMS retention and purge schedules","similarity":"Apply retention periods, notice, export, preservation, and eventual deletion to course data.","remaining_difference":"Operate mainly at whole-course or records-class level rather than classifying individual instructional-support artifacts for refresh, supersession, quarantine, archive, or exception hold.","source_ids":["S2","S7"]}],"distinctive_claim_remaining":"Against a manual pre-term audit augmented by Canvas Link Validator and TidyUP, an artifact-level registry spanning successive offerings will increase correct identification of current versus stale instructional supports and correctly surface assessment, accessibility, and records dependencies before disposition, while preserving recoverability and adding no more than 20% reviewer time. This is falsifiable but unverified; the component practices are established and the novelty lies only in their education-specific integration and measured incremental performance.","confidence":"HIGH"},"implementation_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"Existing Canvas tools demonstrate that course objects, publication state, module use, broken references, centralized templates, and cross-course updates can be inventoried or managed. Institutional policies demonstrate feasible human authority and retention workflows. A read-only prototype is therefore technically plausible. Unverified elements include identity matching across copied shells, reliable semantic contradiction detection, complete external/LTI dependency discovery, accommodation-safe classification without exposing protected information, and successful restoration with historical context. FERPA-governed records and local retention schedules require institution-specific access controls and approval; automated deletion is not justified.","source_ids":["S4","S5","S6","S7"]},"scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":3,"rationale":"Obsolete guidance and poor findability plausibly affect learner interpretation and staff workload, but exact prevalence, affected-student count, and causal outcome magnitude are unmeasured.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3"]},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":4,"rationale":"Multiple universities already conduct decluttering, cleanup, preservation, and purge workflows with named responsible actors, though none explicitly requests the full registry.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S5","S7"]},"incremental_advantage":{"score":3,"rationale":"Dependency gates, exception holds, cross-generation provenance, and reversible disposition could improve on manual audits and permanent-delete tools, but comparative accuracy and workload have not been tested.","source_ids":["S4","S5","S6","S7"]},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":2,"rationale":"The proposal recombines established content audit, link validation, cleanup, version distribution, retention, and archive concepts; only the integrated contrast remains plausibly distinctive.","source_ids":["S1","S4","S5","S6","S7"]},"technical_implementability":{"score":3,"rationale":"Existing scans and cross-course content controls establish basic feasibility, but semantic staleness, copied-object identity resolution, and complete dependency mapping remain material technical uncertainties.","source_ids":["S4","S5","S6"]},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":4,"rationale":"Universities already allocate relevant powers to instructors, instructional designers, LMS administrators, departments, and records authorities; multi-party approval remains necessary for protected artifacts.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S6","S7"]},"evidence_readiness":{"score":3,"rationale":"A bounded read-only comparison can be run with existing snapshots and synthetic cases, but it requires proprietary course data and authorized reviewers.","source_ids":["S1","S4","S5"]},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":4,"rationale":"Quarantine, dependency checks, holds, and restore tests directly address the permanent-deletion risk documented in existing cleanup practice, provided mandatory destruction rules override quarantine.","source_ids":["S5","S7"]},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"Automated inventory and ranking could scale, but per-artifact human review, local policy configuration, and incomplete LMS/LTI dependencies may impose substantial recurring labor.","source_ids":["S5","S6","S8"]}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"UNDER_10K","scope":"One read-only, 80-artifact comparison across four snapshots with two authorized reviewers, eight synthetic sandbox cases, adjudication, and a short findings report.","confidence":"MODERATE","assumptions":["Approximately 60-100 total staff hours.","2026 resource-equivalent loaded labor of roughly $55-$70 per hour, derived by inflating the 2023 higher-education instructional-coordinator mean wage of $35.81 per hour and adding benefits/overhead.","Existing LMS access, sandbox, exports, and analysis tools are available without procurement.","No live content changes, student-record review, or custom production integration."],"source_ids":["S8"]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Prototype registry for one LMS, cross-snapshot identity matching, role-based read-only access, policy workshop, security/privacy review, and pilots in several courses.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Roughly 0.5-1.5 FTE-years across instructional design, LMS engineering, records/accessibility consultation, and project management.","Existing LMS APIs and institutional authentication can be reused.","Semantic detection begins as reviewer-facing heuristics rather than autonomous classification.","Vendor licensing and API-access prices were not retrieved."],"source_ids":["S4","S5","S6","S7","S8"]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Institution-wide production integration, migration/inventory across many course generations, retention and exception configuration, training, support, monitoring, and restore drills.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["A medium-size institution with one principal LMS and multiple LTI/content repositories.","Approximately 3-8 resource-equivalent FTE-years during launch plus infrastructure and assurance work.","Deployment retains human authorization and does not automatically delete content.","Costs could exceed this band for multiple LMSs, poor historical metadata, or extensive bespoke integrations."],"source_ids":["S2","S5","S6","S7","S8"]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Registry maintenance, policy revalidation, exception reviews, reviewer support, integration upkeep, audits, and sampled archive-restore tests.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Approximately 1-2 loaded FTE equivalents plus modest hosting/tooling.","Course owners perform ordinary reviews within existing preparation duties.","No reliable first-party price was found for TidyUP or comparable institution-wide lifecycle software.","Human review volume is controlled by risk-ranked sampling and review queues."],"source_ids":["S2","S6","S8"]}},"verified_pipeline_gates":{"externally_supported_problem":{"status":"YES","reason":"Official university guidance and policy visibly document accumulated, outdated, unused, difficult-to-navigate LMS content, and primary research documents student findability frustration. Exact candidate-specific prevalence remains a gap but does not negate the problem class.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3"]},"externally_credible_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"UQ course coordinators and heads of school, MSU IT, VCU course staff, Canvas administrators/instructional designers, and Arkansas instructors/departments are identifiable actors already exercising adjacent authority.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S5","S6","S7"]},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The registry can be compared with manual audit plus Link Validator/TidyUP on stale-artifact detection, dependency identification, reviewer agreement, false flags, recoverability, and review time.","source_ids":["S1","S4","S5","S6"]},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"An 80-artifact, four-snapshot, read-only sandbox comparison with two reviewers and eight synthetic cases has explicit limits, comparators, metrics, and falsifiers.","source_ids":["S1","S4","S5","S8"]},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"The next step can exclude grades, submissions, identifiable accommodation data, and live visibility changes; instructor/LMS authorization and records/accessibility consultation are required before any later disposition. Mandatory retention or destruction rules remain hard overrides.","source_ids":["S5","S7"]},"credible_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"YES","reason":"All four bands define scope and labor assumptions anchored to an official higher-education instructional-coordinator wage benchmark. Confidence is low beyond first evidence because vendor, integration, and local compliance prices are unavailable.","source_ids":["S8"]}},"next_evidence_step":"With instructor, LMS-administrator, records/privacy, and accessibility approval, use a duplicate sandbox containing four snapshots of one course and no student submissions, grades, or identifiable accommodation records. Sample at most 80 instructor-created support artifacts. Randomize artifacts into a crossover comparison: (A) manual pre-term audit using existing naming, Canvas Link Validator, and TidyUP outputs; versus (B) the same evidence plus the proposed provenance, state, validation-date, owner, dependency, exception, and quarantine registry. Two authorized reviewers independently classify currentness, learner visibility, dependency, retention exception, and proposed state. Seed at most eight synthetic stale-reference, contradiction, and broken-dependency cases. Primary measures are sensitivity to seeded cases, false-flag rate against instructor-confirmed current artifacts, Cohen’s kappa, dependency recall after adjudication, and review time. Proceed only if sensitivity is at least 0.85, false flags are at most 0.10, kappa is at least 0.70, no protected data are exposed, and median review time is no more than 20% above comparator A. Falsify the problem locally if fewer than 5% of authentic artifacts are confirmed stale, contradictory, ownerless, or dependency-ambiguous; falsify incremental advantage if registry-assisted performance does not improve classification or dependency recall, or exceeds the time threshold. Do not change live visibility or delete anything.","blocking_evidence":["No external source quantifies the prevalence of stale or contradictory instructional-support artifacts across copied course generations.","No comparative evidence shows that an artifact lifecycle registry outperforms a careful manual audit augmented by existing Link Validator and TidyUP tools.","Cross-shell artifact identity matching and detection of semantic contradictions have not been validated.","Completeness of assessment, LTI, accessibility, grade-review, and external-reference dependency discovery is unknown.","Institution-specific treatment of instructor-created supports versus FERPA-governed educational records requires local legal and records review.","No direct vendor pricing or institution-specific engineering estimate was found.","Real learner impact, realized staff-time savings, archive restorability, and maintenance burden require live institutional testing."],"research_disposition":"PARTNERED_RESEARCH_PROGRAM","world_novelty_boundary":"World novelty, patentability, freedom to operate, market size, and realized impact were not measured. Bounded search found substantial adjacent components but no direct source documenting the complete cross-generation, artifact-level combination of semantic staleness review, dependency and exception gates, reversible quarantine, deletion markers, and tested restoration. Absence from this search is not evidence of world novelty.","arm":"PROPOSAL_FIRST","candidate_version":0,"controller_recommendation":{"action":"STOP_EMPIRICAL_RESEARCH_NEEDED","repairable":true,"material_progress_observed":true,"progress_targets":["Obtain an authorized four-snapshot course dataset containing only instructor-created support artifacts and document exclusions for grades, submissions, and identifiable accommodation data.","Measure authentic stale, contradictory, ownerless, and dependency-ambiguous artifact prevalence with instructor adjudication.","Benchmark registry-assisted review against manual audit plus Canvas Link Validator and TidyUP using sensitivity, false-flag rate, Cohen’s kappa, dependency recall, and reviewer time.","Validate identity matching across copied shells and explicitly test LTI, assessment, and external-link dependency blind spots.","Secure written instructor, LMS-administrator, records/privacy, and accessibility authority boundaries before any disposition pilot.","Produce institution-specific implementation and recurring-cost estimates, including API access, licensing, integration, training, security review, and archive testing.","After the read-only test, seek separate authorization for a reversible unpublishing pilot only if all performance and safety thresholds are met."],"reason":"Web evidence establishes the problem class, credible institutional actors, adjacent tools, policy constraints, and a bounded test. It cannot establish candidate-specific prevalence, comparative advantage, dependency completeness, or workflow burden. Those questions require proprietary course snapshots, authorized human adjudication, and sandbox testing, so further bounded web research cannot clear the remaining uncertainty."}}