SIS ID column in Gradebook

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through Canvas Release Notes (2020-01-18) 

At present, the SIS ID is not available via browser view of the Gradebook. It shows up as a column in Excel when instructors export the gradebook, but it would be extremely useful to have access to this information without the trouble of exporting and then importing.

 

Instructors who grade anonymous paper submissions, for example, would be able to input grades a great deal more efficiently. Aside from the student name column, the only other student identifier is a column for login ID, which is some version of a student’s name. Thus, there’s currently not a useful way to match students to anonymous paper submissions. While adding a “Notes” column and hand-entering SIS IDs does function as a workaround, doing so introduces many possibilities for error and is inconvenient for instructors.

26 Comments
kmeeusen
Community Champion

Hi  @lisa_ward 

I am not sure how your enrollments are managed, but the credentials entered into Canvas rosters is typically a result of how the enrollment integrations are configured. For example, here is a screenshot of the second column in one of my gradebooks....

216623_pastedImage_3.png

That secondary ID is our SIS ID numbers which are also our Canvas User Login ID.

I think that Canvas is able to display whatever it is fed in this regard, and would suggest talking with the Canvas admins at your school; who, in turn, may need to talk with your SIS and Integration vendors.

KLM

lisa_ward
Community Novice
Author

Hi, Kelley!  I'm actually submitting this feature idea on the advice of my admins. For us, the secondary ID can't be the student ID number; students have a separate, distinct Login ID that our institution must use. Thanks for your help, though!

Lisa

ahess4
Community Contributor

The secondary id in the gradebook is the user's 'SIS login ID' (what is used to login into canvas), which is a different value from the user's 'SIS ID'. The SIS ID is not shown in the gradebook, but is shown on the People page, if the person viewing the people page has the 'Read SIS data' permission. Additionally, the SIS ID is shown in the export of the gradebook as 'SIS User ID'.

What, I believe, Lisa asking for is the SIS ID that is in the People page and gradebook export is also included in the gradebook itself as a column.

Disclosure: I am a Canvas admin at Lisa Ward's institution.

Thanks,

Anthony

lisa_ward
Community Novice
Author

Thanks for the clarification, Anthony!

chriscas
Community Coach
Community Coach

If this is implemented, can i also suggest a way for teachers to hide the login/sis columns?  I know some find them valuable, but for others, they just add clutter to an already busy page, causing the need for additional horizontal scrolling.

s_eberhard
Community Novice

Maybe an option to show the SIS ID, or the SIS Login or both or none, would be great. Smiley Happy

e_vande_belt
Community Novice

I completely agree with adding an additional SIS_something_ID field for grading, but I'd like to stress that this should be a field from the User object, not (one of) the (related) Login objects. A student is one person, with, in this case, one unique identifier. If a field from the Login object would be chosen, the behaviour would be depending on the number of Logins per User, the order in which those Logins were added, etc.

davwoods
Community Novice

In our previous LMS, the gradebook had a 'setup' option with a list of fields that could be displayed in the gradebook entry for a student including: the section id, the student number (SIS ID), the login id (which is separate from the SIS ID at our university), the Name (in two formats: FirstLast and LastFirst), and official university email address. That allowed instructors and TAs to find and grade by any and all of those identifying attributes.  Our instructors are asking for these options to be available again.

kiran_mohan
Community Explorer

An excellent idea and would be a great improvement to the grade book/marks page. We are currently facing the same issue at our University were we populate the Student/Staff number as the SIS ID and the email address as Login/Secondary ID for users.

Our academics find it hard to identify the student when there are multiple students with the same name. We populate the secondary ID field with the email address of the student which does not help to identify the student (not always you know the email address of the student). The principle relationship for an academic to determine the student would be the student number.

Populating an additional column to show the SIS ID would help resolve the problem. Academics can use either SIS ID or Secondary ID in the mark/grade book if we allow the option to view both, this does not break the use of Secondary ID field for someone who is using this currently.

P.S: Please consider also updating the filter to use the SIS ID.

235908_filter.PNG

jpinto
Community Member

This is a surprising discovery for our institution. We need the student numbers in our gradebook - not the loginid.