Technical Administrators

As a Technical Administrator of your organization's Bruin Learn account, you can access three different environments: production, test, and beta. The section below will detail each of these environments so you can use them effectively.

Production Environment

Your production instance is your live instance- the environment where students see and enroll in live courses.

To log into your production environment, go to: https://bruinlearn.ucla.edu and sign in with your UCLA Logon ID.

Test Environment

The test environment is a mirror instance of your production environment. You can test and troubleshoot without messing up your live production environment. Add users, change the CSS, or troubleshoot issues without ruining the experience for your users.

To log into your test environment, go to: https://ucla.test.instructure.com Links to an external site.and sign in with your UCLA Logon ID.

Things you should know about the test environment:

• It resets every month on the 3rd Saturday
• Notifications do not send

Beta Environment

Beta environments are also copies of your production environment. Beta environments allow you to explore new features before they reach production, such as upcoming Canvas tools and features, bug fixes, etc. Beta information refreshes weekly. Features added to the beta environment are planned for the next production environment release. However, sometimes complications discovered in the beta phase delay the release of new features and functionality.

To log into your beta environment, go to: https://ucla.beta.instructure.com Links to an external site. and sign in with your UCLA Logon ID.

Things you should know about the beta environment:

• It resets every week on Saturday
• Notifications do not send

TEST will refresh monthly on the 3^rd Saturday, and BETA refreshes every Saturday. Times will vary, and we cannot schedule or move these updates. The refreshes are standard across all Canvas users and cannot be paused or moved.

Guide: What is the Canvas release schedule for beta, production, and test environments? Links to an external site.

Familiarize yourself with the menu items located in the Admin Navigation Menu.

Guide: How do I use the Global Navigation Menu as an admin? Links to an external site.

Technical admins can create new courses or course shells by request.

Guide: How do I start a new course from the Dashboard as an instructor? Links to an external site.  

Roles

There are two types of roles --- account-level roles and course-level roles.

The following are proposed foundational roles at the root (institutional) account tier; we fully expect these roles to evolve and expand, when necessary, over time.

Account-level roles are roles and permissions assigned at the sub-account level and depend on your department or college settings. The current roles in the UCLA instance are as follows:

• Account Admin
• Sub-Account Admin (custom)
• Academic Support (custom)
• Technical Support (custom)
• Sub-Account Analytics (custom)

Course-level roles include SIS provisioned roles assigned upon enrollment, including Teacher, Student, and TA. Custom roles include Participant and Observer. Technical admins may also manually add users to a course.

Permissions for course roles can vary across sub-accounts, allowing a user to have a specific function with a course. By default, Bruin Learn comes with five default roles:

• Teacher
• TA
• Designer
• Student
• Observer

Two additional custom roles include: 

• Grader (custom)
• Participant (custom)

Permissions

Permissions are the privileges given to each role.

All roles and permissions created at the root-account level will trickle down into the sub-accounts.

Please remember that the roles and permissions created satisfy most needs in Bruin Learn. However, we realize that in some rare cases, there may be the need to have new roles created and permissions modified.

To do so, we strongly suggest you work with the Bruin Learn Root administrator or the COE to assess the use case and determine how best to implement it.

Important: 

• All users do not have permissions until they are enrolled in a course or given Account or Sub-Account level permissions.

Reference the  UCLA LMS Canvas Roles and Permissions Summary  (Links to an external site.)  to learn more about user roles and permissions and how they integrate into the overall hierarchy.

Guide:  What user roles and permissions are available in Canvas? Links to an external site.  

Global announcements allow you to contact all or specific users within an account or sub-account using one message.  

Guide:  How do I create a global announcement in an account? Links to an external site.