Frequently asked questions
If your question is not here, write to edu@canoanumis.org — a human answers, usually within two business days. District privacy reviews go to privacy@canoanumis.org.
Getting started
Is Canoa // edu free?
Pilots for the 2026–27 school year are free: one school, unlimited teachers, the full feature set, with the NDPA signed before the first student launch. Pricing for district-wide use is on the pricing page; homeschool use of the public catalog and lesson plans is free and always will be.
Do I need to install anything?
No. Canoa // edu is a web tool that your LMS launches over LTI 1.3. There is nothing to install on student devices and no browser extension.
Can I try it without an LMS?
Yes — the demo assignment runs in any browser with no account. Homeschoolers and co-ops can work entirely from the public catalog and the lesson plans; see for homeschool.
How long does setup take?
About fifteen minutes for an LMS administrator, once per district. The step-by-step guides for Canvas, Schoology, and Moodle are on how it works.
In the classroom
Do students need accounts?
No. Students launch from your LMS and we receive only an anonymous identifier. There is no password, no email, and nothing for a student to forget.
Can students cheat with an AI chatbot?
Each student gets a different coin from the filter you chose, so there is no shared answer to copy. A chatbot asked about a specific catalog number without the record in front of it will usually invent a plausible wrong answer — which is itself a teachable moment we build into the data-literacy track.
What if a student has no Latin or Greek?
Only the AP Latin track assumes Latin. The history, art, and data tracks work from English catalog descriptions and images.
Can I write my own assignment?
Yes. The assignment builder lets you pick a task type and filter the catalog by ruler, mint, denomination, metal, and date range, then set how many variants to generate.
Can students work offline?
The lesson-plan PDFs are designed to be printed and used without devices. The graded assignments need a browser.
Privacy and compliance
What student data do you collect?
An opaque LTI identifier, the course context id, the answers, and the scores. No names, no emails, no photos. The complete list is in the Student Privacy Policy.
Do you use student work to train AI models?
No — never, and it is stated as a contractual commitment, not a preference. Where our curriculum involves AI, the AI works with the open coin catalog, never with student work.
Will you sign our district agreement?
Yes. We sign the NDPA (SDPC Standard Version) and, where available, offer an Exhibit E General Offer so other districts in your state can join without renegotiating.
Is there an accessibility conformance report?
Yes, published as accessible HTML rather than a PDF: ACR.
Content and licensing
Where does the coin data come from?
From CANOA, an open catalog aggregating published scholarly type corpora — Roman Imperial, Roman Republican, Greek and Hellenistic, Byzantine — with links back to the holding museums. Type data is open under ODbL.
Do we need to license the images?
No. Museum images are displayed on canoanumis.org with attribution under each museum's open-access policy. Nothing is copied into your LMS, and our PDFs contain catalog numbers and links rather than pictures.
Is the scholarship reliable?
The records come from the standard reference corpora used by numismatists, with the catalog number visible on every coin card so a student — or a teacher — can check the attribution against the printed literature.
Still deciding?
The fastest way to judge a tool is to use it. The demo takes thirty seconds and asks nothing of you; a lesson plan takes one class period and asks no signature.