Organizing Students without SIS

[kevinw]

So my institution is in a unique situation. We don't have a SIS, nor do we integrate with them. The reason we do this is because we are a third party provider who offers a product to Texas Public Schools. 

But how do I organize the students enrolled in our instance of Canvas? If I had 3 different high schools and I wanted them organized in some way how would I do that? 

I thought about using groups but we don't really think it's necessary for them to have a "group page" as they are in class working together. 

[shane_ohara]

We organize the colleges of our university into their own sub-account. I would think that this is your best option rather than groups. You can learn more at Accounts - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation.

Shane

[f_latulipe]

You are not alone!!!

Sub accounts is great for separating courses by schools, BUT all users are set up at the root level.

Groups didn't help us either as we need the information (attributes) saved with the user and we needed the information where we manage the users.

I had several conversations with our Customer Success Manager about how best to set this up for our project, as we don't have a single MIS system to integrate with and potentially students from a number of schools as users.

We are basically making use of prefixes in the 'Sortable_Name' field to help us here, AND are having to do some data manipulation in Excel outside of the system to create the prefixes automatically based on the source/school of the user information.  i.e. we use the Sortable_Name to store key attributes about a user, which CANVAS does not have a separate field for.

For users who do not a unique SIS ID from an external MIS system - we are assigning them a unique ID.

(We also use the SIS import functionality to do a bulk upload / update users and add enrolments)

For example:

School A Students who are currently in Year 5 have  Sortable_Name prefix 'AS5'  

(the following year we would change the prefix to 'AS6' whilst keeping the same SIS ID and will be able to do this using a spreadsheet and the SIS Import functionality to quickly make this change for a lot of students, and equally make students you have graduated no longer active.  If you do a SIS Import with a user record of an existing unique SIS ID, it updates the other fields about the user - i.e. you can update the prefixes in bulk if you need as long as the users unique SIS IDs are there).

School A Teachers have Sortable_Name prefix 'AT'   

School B Students who are currently in Year 5 have Sortable_Name prefix 'BS6'  

School B Teachers have Sortable_Name prefix 'BT'

This ultimately means that the users page on Canvas which is sorted alphabetically on the Sortable_Name effectively groups your users together.  All users from School A start with 'A' and the second character is the user is a student or a staff member, the 3rd digit enables us to sort by year group too.

(Ps I have asked for the Sortable Name to be visible on the course People page, and for some user friendly searches to be made available on the course enrolment page to be able to quickly find existing users based on sub-strings of any of the user fields - including the sortable name).

I hope this makes sense!

[Robbie_Grant]

 @kevinw ,

We are giving the Canvas Admins area a little bit of love (especially questions that are really, really old) and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie