[People] Allow +People for Admins after a Course Ends

[james_whalley]

Our admins routinely add users to past courses. Generally, these are instructors of the next semester of a course or course admins who need to get information for a faculty member. Sometimes it is a student who needs to be added to aa new section to finish an incomplete. In order to add anyone using +People though, the Canvas admins must change the course dates. Please make the +People button available to account/subaccount level admins at all times.

[LMacaulay]

Yes, this is very much needed at the admin level.  It is cumbersome to have to go into a course and change the availability dates, add the person, masquerade to accept the invite, then revert the dates back to conclude the course.  Also, since sub-account admins can't masquerade, then a request to add a faculty member to a concluded course so they can see the content to prepare for teaching a future iteration requires top-level admin intervention.  So much wasted time for such a simple action.

[jrw344]

Yes, this is very much needed. I agree with LMacaulay's comment. It's a lot of extra unnecessary steps to work around this access limitation. We sometimes need to add guest speakers to past courses as visitors, so they can see what the course is like. We also sometimes switch which faculty we support for workload reasons or we hire new admins. Therefore, we need to add admins to the old courses; so they can do course copies from old to new Canvas pages. These are a just some of the reasons. As administrative assistants, we are here to support faculty; however, it's difficult to do that when our access is limited.

[Erica0]

Yes, as an academic advisor, I have supported numerous students who had to take incompletes and are working with the instructor after the semester has ended to access the course material so they can finish their work. And more time is spent trying to get them added again to their Canvas course than any other point of the process.

Please streamline this to make it easier on instructors and the students trying to learn.

[ehansonusu]

Concur, making too much work for Admins.

[ksurchek]

Yes, yes, yes!

[chriscas]

I'd definitely support this idea!  I would say that perhaps a warning could come up just letting the admin know the course is over, but letting them continue and add the person if they wish.  The current method of having to change the date or term, do the person addition, then change the date/term back has always been a pain!

-Chris

[SharonTSS]

Yes to all, and yes to @chriscas warning recommendation. Our use case is that we run professional learning courses for teachers and often want to give new teachers access to past content without reopening the course. 

[hmcneill]

This would be very useful when teachers need added to a prior course which they did not teach so that they can import content for teaching in this academic year. Admins should be able to add People without having additional steps to change course dates first.

[nolaug]

We would find this very helpful.