[ARCHIVED] Manual Enrollment Without Notifications

[alexander_mitch]

Hello, all. This is a common enough issue that I'm sure others have dealt with.

Our enrollments are primarily handled through SIS integration or manual .csv uploads, but from time to time we need to enroll a single instructor in a course.

It would be far, far simpler to be able to do this through the UI in such cases—but when I enroll a user this way, there is an automatic notification generated, and the notification information is confusing/incorrect due to the way our SSO is configured (specifically, the username provided in the message is not the username we'd choose to give people.)

My questions are:

• Is there any way to disable this notification?
• Is there any way to modify this notification?
• How do you handle this kind of issue at your institution?

[bneporadny · Accepted solution]

Hi Alexander,

I am not aware of a way currently to disable the enrollment email that gets sent from Canvas upon enrolling someone manually and to be honest haven't really put too much thought about it going out when enrolling someone into a course manually.  As these are typically one off situations and are request done by that individual so to me them getting the email is a easy way to see that their request has been completed. 

But definitely see the value and merit in having an option to not send out the enrollment email when you're manually enrolling a user into a course. 

I'm sure you were hoping that there was an easy button to make this happen, but unfortunately at this time that just isn't the case from what I know of within the Canvas interface. 

[kevinhitt · Accepted solution]

For cases such as this at my institution - we do an SIS import, of just the 1 individual. 

While cumbersome, we haven't discovered an alternative yet. 

Best of luck,

Kevin Hitt

University of South Florida - Office of Corporate Training and Professional Education

[bneporadny · Accepted solution]

Hi Alexander,

I am not aware of a way currently to disable the enrollment email that gets sent from Canvas upon enrolling someone manually and to be honest haven't really put too much thought about it going out when enrolling someone into a course manually.  As these are typically one off situations and are request done by that individual so to me them getting the email is a easy way to see that their request has been completed. 

But definitely see the value and merit in having an option to not send out the enrollment email when you're manually enrolling a user into a course. 

I'm sure you were hoping that there was an easy button to make this happen, but unfortunately at this time that just isn't the case from what I know of within the Canvas interface. 

[alexander_mitch]

Thanks for the reply, Brian!

It seems like at smaller institutions, exceptional situations tend to be a sizable percentage of all the situations somehow. It may be that we need to reexamine the way we're handling our SSO integration. I'm sure we didn't know it would interact with notification systems this way.

[kevinhitt · Accepted solution]

For cases such as this at my institution - we do an SIS import, of just the 1 individual. 

While cumbersome, we haven't discovered an alternative yet. 

Best of luck,

Kevin Hitt

University of South Florida - Office of Corporate Training and Professional Education

[rebecca_william]

I would recommend using Enrollments API. We ran into the issue of students not "accepting" invites and therefore not even getting course Announcements in manually enrolled courses. We use SIS for most, but for manual entry API allows you to set the enrollment to "active" and skip sending notification. It is a simple POST with a couple of parameters. 

Shameless plug for Deactivated user‌'s "PRE-CON: API 101: Introduction to APIs" at InstructureCon 2019 - I learned how to do these API calls using Postman last year!

[JACOBSEN_C]

We use the live API for this.  It's pretty handy. 

• Generate an access token in your settings
• Copy the user to be enrolled's user number (in the URL when looking at their profile)
• Copy course number you need them in (similar-same)
• Go to https://mcad.instructure.com/doc/api/live (i'm assuming...)
• Add that token & click "save token"
• give it a minute, it takes a minute
• scroll to and click "enrollments"
• Click the green "Post" button for either 'course' or 'sections", depending...
• scroll thoroughly down etc. etc.
• Enter/paste the user number and course number where the're needed
• Choose the teacher course role (or what's needed)
• ***make sure "enrollment state" is "ACTIVE"
• Scroll down and click the "try it out" button
• Wait a minute...
• Green is good, red is bad - check the courses enrollment to make sure it worked.
• Done.

[muh · Accepted solution]

Here is an alternative way without using API. First, enroll the user as an observer which will not trigger the notification, and then update the role, done.

[kevinhitt]

Clever! I like it - thank you

[ruh]

We have used this workaround for a couple of years, but it seems it has stopped working - now our users seem to receive notifications even when they are enrolled as an observer.