Separate the permissions for Add/Remove [Role] to allow users to add to sections within the course, but not add new users to the course

[NathanGoodwin]

Problem statement:

Currently, the way the "Add/Remove [Role]" permission works is it allows teachers to not only add teachers and students to their course sections but also allows them to add entirely new students and teachers to a course. This creates an issue where if a teacher wants another co-teacher added to their course, rather than go through the proper channels to have them added in the SIS and then synced down to Canvas, they can simply just type in a teacher's email into Canvas and add them to their course. A similar issue with teachers adding students who aren't formally in the course yet either.

Proposed solution:

Separating the permission further to say "Edit [role] sections" to further distinguish the permission from adding students/teachers/etc manually. We typically want teachers to be able to edit their own sections, but not add whole new students/teacher to a course.

User role(s):

admin

[ModeratorPanda]

I am happy to share that this can already be done by changing the permissions for Teacher users to prevent them from enrolling Teacher or Student users in a course. This does not prevent SIS from managing the enrollments of users in the course. Teachers can use the groups and/or tags features to manage students within their courses. There is a product blog entry that explains the difference between sections, groups and differentiation tags.

To help our Product Teams evaluate new ideas, this thread has been moved to our Will Not Consider status.