Ability to change a users role without deleting the user

[egronikowski]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

  Idea will be open for vote June 3rd, 2015 - September 2nd, 2015  Learn more about voting...

Currently, to change a users role on a course, the user has to be deleted and added back in.  This results in additional, unnecessary invitations to the course.  It would be great if we could simply change or add roles to the user without deleting.

  Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through theCanvas Production Release Notes (2016-01-09)

People

Edit Enrollment Type

[Renee_Carney]

Thank you Holly

Would you please submit a support ticket?  Let us know what they say.

[hvaughn]

Done and am waiting on a response.  Will post here when one is received.

[hvaughn]

Getting a little frustrated here.  I submitted a support request last week.  I have had no response from support regarding the issue (is there a fix?  Is is a bug?  Is Canvas behaving as designed???)  with the exception of two emails wanting to close the ticket. That's kind of crazy. Will get a bigger stick with a longer reach to poke someone.

[hvaughn]

Okay, I logged onto the service cloud to find the response. I was waiting for an email response - lazy me.  It was suggested I submit it as a new feature idea, which I have: 

[Renee_Carney]

Ah...  the support/idea conundrum...  This is one of those tricky ones.  Let me get an official stance from the product manager.

[Renee_Carney]

Hi Holly

The observer role was purposefully omitted from this design.  There are no current plans to change the design of this feature.  if you are interested in suggesting this as an idea, please submit it as a new Canvas Feature Idea.​

If you are seeking a very specific Teacher Observer role, which would view the entire course, you (or your local Canvas admin) may want to explore a custom account-level role.

[Stef_retired]

 @ewerhardt , are you not using the new "Edit Role" capability (which, as referenced above, was implemented with the production release of January 9, 2016)? Please refer to How do I edit user roles in a course?. Or have I misunderstood your concern with the current functionality of editing user roles?

[cms_hickss]

I think it might be the word "deleting" that's throwing  @ewerhardt ​. If it is, you don't have to delete the user from the system. In the past you had to delete the user from the course and then re-add them in the new/different role.

[Stef_retired]

 @ewerhardt , can you clarify what you need to accomplish, or perhaps offer a use case? Roles do not attach to the user; they reside at the course level, so a user who is enrolled as a teacher in one course might be enrolled as a student in another one. Of necessity, then, if an admin wants to edit a user role, he or she needs to do that at the course level, specifically in the course in which that user is enrolled, to change that user's role in the course.

[scottdennis]

Hi Erik,

I may be wrong but my sense is that the reason you don't see information about roles and enrollments listed in the Users view of the admin console is that with some users having many many enrollments the UI could quickly get overloaded.  As you probably know, by clicking on a user's name from the User view you are taken to a profile view that lets you scroll through their enrollments.  As of today you can then click on a given course, go in and edit a user's role from there.  With the editing of user roles being relatively new, it is perhaps not surprising that workflows throughout the UI haven't been yet been optimized for this newer feature.  Based on your experience as an LMS admin, would you think it would make more sense to add editing of roles to the Users view in the admin console or would it be better added to the individual profile view that is one click down from the comprehensive users list?