Hi Eric
We've been looking at ways to automate group creation and automate the management of memberships. There is an API, however, it's a bit more challenging to work with than the normal Canvas API. Creating groups is pretty straightforward, where we are running into an issue is around group membership. If a user hasn't accessed commons they don't exist in the system which creates a bit of problem when adding users to groups.
We are still wrestling with it but we are moving forward with using commons as our primary method of delivering course templates to courses with more than one section. The flexibility, level of instructor control, and ease of use are worth the effort of manually managing the groups.
Our current workflow involves a service request through our ticket system from the department or program. This request will provide a group name, manager, proxy, and initial group membership. We then create the group and add the manager and proxy. Then we will process the initial membership. After that, we turn it over to the manager and/or proxy to manage.
Ideally, we'd process the group memberships from the course assignments in Banner, but without being able to create the user accounts and link them to our Canvas instance it's been a manual process.
Canvas Commons REST API Documentation
https://lor.instructure.com/docs/api/
Let me know how you make out.
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