How can teachers create courses in Canvas and populate them with students from a cohort defined is the SIS?

[tobe_baeyens]

Often teachers want to create courses for specific groups of students. These groups are defined in our student information system (f.e. all the international students, all the students that belong to a departement,...).

When a course gets created through SIS, it's automatically populated with the right students, and the course is connected with SIS through SIS ID's. How can we achieve the same result with manually created courses.

The end result should be that:

• The course has one or more sections with a SIS ID
• These sections are automatically populated and updated through SIS

The university of Washington does this through UW Groups (UW Groups - Providing access to your Canvas Course | UW Tacoma). Is this something that can be easily implemented?

[abunag · Accepted solution]

UW Groups looks like a custom integration they built - I'd suggest reaching out to them directly to find out more about it, and how it's tied back to their SIS.  Since it's custom, it's probably not going to be easy to implement, but there's no way to know without asking.

In the end, it's going to have to be something that ties back into your SIS, since as far as I'm aware none of the information (such as if they're an international student) gets passed to Canvas via the traditional SIS import.

[tobe_baeyens]

Ok thanks. I just wonder how other institutions create courses with cohorts. In our current LMS we have LMS groups that are every hour synced with our SIS groups. If a teacher wants to create a new course, he can just fill in the name of the course and select the LMS group of students that is in the course. The students of these groups are synced with our SIS so the students in our courses are always correct. Is this possible in Canvas? And if not, what is the alternative?