[ARCHIVED] Hidden Canvas Permissions

[asatkins]

Hi all,

While we're voting for more granular permissions (vote here!) I wondered if it would be helpful to share the things we've learned the hard way on canvas permissions. Please clarify the type of permission (course level- student/teacher/observer or account level- various admin access) because some are named the same thing but do not behave exactly the same way.

Here are some we have found:

Course Level:

"Manage all other course content" - if this is disabled and you have set prerequisites on the modules page (must submit/must view/must progress in order, etc) the teacher or TA will also be subject to the prerequisites that were designed for students. This will force the teacher to complete the course in order to view the next page. If you enable it, it gives them access to edit any part of the modules page (add/remove content, add/delete modules). Our teachers work off of set content developed by course designers, so we try to lock down things as much as we can.

"View discussions" - if this is disabled all course level announcements will show on the student's dashboard, but when they click on it Canvas will give them the "page has been disabled" top banner. It doesn't seem to warn teachers when they post them, so our teachers kept posting them for several days before any of our students let us know they could no longer see them. You can turn off all of the other related discussion permissions if you don't use them (we don't because of moderation issues with online and underage students) but you have to leave on this one if you want announcements.

Account Level:

"Add/Remove admins" and "Become other users" - this only allows you to interact with other admins at or below your level. Canvas seems to determine "at or below" as you having every permission they have or all of them plus. If a permission level has a single permission you do not, you can't add people to that level and you can't masquerade as anyone in that permissions level.

"Manage (add/edit/delete) courses"- this must be enabled for a user to be able to publish or conclude a course. The technical permission for publishing is "Change course state", but with that selected a user still cannot publish/conclude. We actually disabled Change state and it seems to have no affect on ability to publish at all, so I have no idea what that permission does, but you can't publish without Manage courses.

There are certainly more... but I've spent all day trying to write this around office traffic, so if people are interested in discussing I'll add a few more tomorrow

Thanks!

[John_Lowe]

Yes, please share more!​

[harker]

Agreed. I have already voted for this. Instructure should have a fine print guide of what each permission does (a definition) and its effects.

[John_Lowe]

harker, check with your CSM about this.  Deactivated user​ sent me a PDF guide that has a fairly decent list of each permission, what it does, and the features affected.  It didn't answer all of my questions, but it helped.  At the time, Ben called this guide a work-in-progress and wasn't made generally available yet.  Perhaps times have changed and this document is released somewhere.

[kona]

 @scottdennis ​ posted this in another forum and I think it's what you're talking about - https://s3.amazonaws.com/tr-learncanvas/docs/Canvas_Permissions_Account.pdf 

[awilliams]

Thank you very much  @kona ​. I had been searching for this today and wrote my own question before finding this discussion. I sure hope we can get guides with this info in it with regular updates as things change.

[bhauf]

Here is the PDF guide for the Course Role Permissions: https://s3.amazonaws.com/tr-learncanvas/docs/Canvas_Permissions_Course.pdf

[asatkins]

We do have access to that, but we've still found it to be incomplete and at some times inaccurate (It lists 'change course state' as the required permission to publish, for example). Have any of you found other permissions shortcuts? I still have to look through some of my old notes to see what else we've found.

[erinhmcmillan]

Amanda,

If you are finding inconsistencies, please let us know. Permissions is a complicated beast and we're trying to give everyone the most accurate information that we can.

Thanks!

Erin

[awilliams]

erinhallmark​, I was searching for this exact information (detailed explanation of the impact of each permission setting) and turned up several guides but not this discussion (though I probably didn't scroll down far enough or was searching in Canvas Guides rather than across all of Jive). Would it be possible to provide the information contained in these PDF's as official guides with regular updates and version history?

[kona]

Yes, yes, yes!!

[erinhmcmillan]

Hi Adam,

The creation process/formatting of PDFs linked directly in our permissions guide articles are not something we planned to change, as the information is treated as supplemental and doesn't live in either the community site or our documentation site. We may be able to figure out an uncomplicated way to create updates in the admin space, for instance... but probably not directly in the guides site. I'll present the idea to the team and let you know what they say.

Thanks!

Erin

[asatkins]

Hi erinhallmark​!

Will do! We've seen the ones in the original post and I was planning on continuing to post as I come across them, should I be communicating any of this another way as well? We do a lot of permissions shifting for an institution our size

Thanks!

[erinhmcmillan]

 @asatkins ​,

For now, posting here is fine and we'll make changes accordingly. Thanks!

awilliams​ and  @kona ​,

The team feels that we could post and maintain a document in this group highlighting the changes in the PDF. Deactivated user​ will be managing the permissions information, so watch for something from her soon.

Thanks,

Erin

[awilliams]

Yay! Thanks!

[kona]

Yay! That's awesome!

[asatkins]

Okay, here is one more we've found, but it could be the combination of permissions- The account level permission "Add/Remove students for the course" - with "See list of users" enabled for this permission level (our Teacher admin role). With both enabled a teacher can search for a student on the account level and see their user page. This is the one with Name/Email, Login info, Enrollments and Page views. 

We removed the Add/remove students permission because we didn't want teachers to be able to remove students from their SIS-imported courses on accident (which we caught, of course, when someone did it ). This made it so our teachers could search for a user on the account level, but not see any portion of their user page. We had to turn it back on and just give everyone a talking to about leaving that cute little "x" button alone because our teachers need that user page

[awilliams]

Another point about the "Add/Remove students for the course" is that it impacts the ability to add students to a section within the course. This became an issue for us when trying to find a fully faculty controlled method for dealing with incompletes and using this guide What do I do if a student has an incomplete?​. Since we have that permission disabled for the "Teacher" role for the same reason as you described this meant an admin would have to get involved with adding a student to a section. Not a huge deal, but it was difficult to figure that out and required a call to support.

[jlafrance]

 @asatkins ​, awilliams,  @kona ​​,  @John_Lowe , ​and harker ​(and anyone else who reads this):

I have created a document for Canvas Permission Updates in the Canvas Admins space. Starting today, May 16, we will post any updates that are made to the Canvas Course Role Permissions and Canvas Account Role Permissions PDF documents. As a team, we felt creating the Canvas Permissions Updates document in the Canvas Admins space was the best way to maintain, share, and communicate changes with you. We hope you will find this helpful.

Amanda, we'll review your comments above and post an update on the new document if necessary.

Thanks, friends! We truly appreciate all the feedback. Have a great weekend.

Jenn

[awilliams]

Hey Deactivated user​, this document describing updates to the permission details described in the PDF's is a great step forward for us admins. Would you have any problem with us creating two documents in the Canvas Admins​ group that has all the same information the PDF's have plus gets updated (by the community) as your team posts updates to your document? The aim of this would be to create two documents within the community and maintained by the community that has comprehensive and up-to-date information about each permission. I didn't want to over-reach by creating these without asking you first.

[John_Lowe]

Great suggestion, awilliams​!  This way it could contain the official information from Instructure and the additional information like  @asatkins ​ shared by starting this discussion thread.

[erinhmcmillan]

Hey Adam,

The idea was that we'd create our document to update you with the PDF changes, but we are also going to incorporate comments left by the community on the doc (e.g. Amanda's first paragraph about add/removing students). The PDF is meant to be as up to date as possible with all information that we have, not just the information that comes from us. Jenn spends a LOT of time testing permissions against Canvas, and the doc outlines any discrepancies, etc. But if you guys find added information, we're more than happy to include it—and if it's something that needs to be addressed, we can mention it to our engineers or see if it is something that is already being investigated. Basically we'd just love to help verify that permissions are functioning how they are supposed to. We feel that keeping all the basic information about permissions in various places may become convoluted (even if it were to match the PDF information), so we recommend it best to keep all that information in the same location. Therefore we'd advise against that.

HOWEVER, Amanda also mentioned a user-case scenario, and we can see how you would also find those important. Our document outlines the "what" of the permissions and how they work, but the community is meant to create information about the "why". Therefore, instead of duplicating efforts and copying the same information in the PDF (pretty sure nobody wants to re-create the same formatting with all the lovely tables, right?), we'd suggest that you create an additional resource that helps explain user-based scenarios according to the permissions defined in the PDF. (Our document wouldn't have the space required to outline the different ways you grant permissions based on user roles.) So your document could link to the permissions document as a resource for those who need it, but the purpose of the document would be to create permissions headings with helpful scenarios for each permission. That idea doesn't duplicate information and provides two independent resources that each benefit the community. Thoughts?

Erin

[asatkins]

Hi all,

If you're interested I've opened a new discussion topic for posting permissions combinations you've found work for your institution.

Canvas Limited Admin Permissions for Specific Roles - Share Yours!

Thanks for your input so far! Come share and help us learn together!