What is TidyUP?

TidyUP is a content cleanup tool for Canvas courses that provides a quick way to view all of the content in your course and clean out anything that is no longer needed. Identifying and deleting extra files, folders, pages, or assignments that are no longer needed makes your course easier to manage and more usable for everyone!

NOTE: You can use the link to the Files folder in the Navigation panel of your Canvas course as well.

Why TidyUP?

TidyUP allows you to do the following in any Canvas course:

Identify and delete all files that are not being used in your course.
See what files are being used in your course and where they are being used.
Find empty folders in the files section of your course and delete them.
View a list of all your Canvas pages, assignments, quizzes or discussions with information about each page and the ability to delete multiple pages at once.

Use Cases for TidyUP

Someone accidentally imported content into a course twice and now you have two version of every page (i.e. "Home Page" and "Home Page-1"). TidyUP to the rescue! do a quick search for "-1" to find all of the extra copies and delete them all with the click of a button.
You are doing a final course check before the semester begins and you want to make sure all of your relevant content is listed in modules, has content and is ready for students from day one.
Someone accidentally created multiple versions of an assignment, do a quick check to see which one is actually linked to from other content and delete the others!
An instructor has been teaching online and has a beautiful collection of syllabi from the past 10 years that they are ready to clean up.
A course needs to be made accessible for a student who is blind and the accessibility office would like to focus their remediation efforts on files that are actually being used in the course.

How Do I Access TidyUP?

Select TidyUP from your Canvas course navigation.
Select the Scan Course button to get started! You can choose to scan all file types or limit the scan to selected types by using the Custom option.
Your scan is now in progress. Depending on how much content you have in your course, this may take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes.
As soon as the scan is finished, you will see some tabs where you can view all of the files, folders, and Canvas content in your course.

By default, the Files tab in TidyUP will show you all files - both used and unused.

You may select the dropdown menu to filter by either Unused Files or Files In Use.

Use the Canvas Files Tab

You can always use the Files tab in Canvas instead. It doesn't give you the same level of detail as TidyUp but as a best practice it is a good way to replaace files you are trying to remediate. You can upload and test over and over again until your score is 100%. I find this to be the easiest method.