Different faculty permissions for SIS and non-SIS courses?

[dholton]

I'm looking into how to allow faculty to add people to sandboxes but not SIS (for credit) courses.  I see other schools that seem to be doing that (like U.Minnesota), but I'm having trouble finding the best way to do it.  Similarly, could faculty have other permissions in non-SIS courses such as editing the name of the sandbox but not have those permissions in SIS courses.  I see that some schools might create two faculty roles, one for SIS courses and one for non-SIS.  Perhaps some use sub-accounts.  My last school ran a script each day that synchronized the SIS with Canvas so that if a faculty member added someone in a student or faculty role (but not other roles), the person would be removed/deactivated.

Also, are there other scripts out there that allow faculty to create sandboxes on their own but control how it is done.  I found this script:

• https://github.com/CUOnline/sandbox
• Are there others out there?

I see several other examples at other schools such as:

• https://www.sfu.ca/canvas/instructors/getting-started/new-single-shell.html
• https://it.umn.edu/canvas-request-course-site#nonacademic

[rebecca_william]

We use an APEX form - uses API - that our developers created for instructors to create sandboxes themselves. The field for course name is editable in the form, but not once the course is created. We have these sandbox courses created in a sub-account (development) with the permissions set so that instructors can add/remove other instructors and TA's but no student enrollment is allowed. This prevents them from using these courses as a regular-for-credit course. They can copy the material to an SIS course when they are ready to go live. They can share content (without violating FERPA) with other instructors in development courses. If they need to share the content with students, like for an "advising corner" then Account Admin moves the course to yet another sub-account (Manually-created) that does have a second faculty role (we call it Teacher-Plus) that allows student enrollment. 

It is important is that you "Allow teachers to create courses" in the account settings but use Javascript/CSS to hide the created course buttons in the UI. 

Another tricky part of this is the self-enrollment feature. We discovered that if there was no SIS_ID when the courses were created in the development sub-account, then instructors could activate self-enrollment and by-pass our system. We modified the APEX to add a bogus SIS_ID based off (the user_id and a counter) to close that gap. When we move the course to Manually-created we remove the SIS_ID so that self-enrollment is active in those courses.

[dholton]

Thank you!