A way of packaging students that have common features and assign all that pack (group It doesn't matter the name) to a course.

[Repol]

The issue is how to manage students and have a list of control to assign all the pack to courses at once.  I know this philosophy is against the canvas model where you assign people to courses . I read there's an API and csv way to do it but there is another way to do it better in function of our goals?

NOTE: I read about the API integrations but is there any annexed contents to know how to integrated? Could yo provide me a route of that content?

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @Repol,

In most education environments, there is what is called a Student Information System (SIS) which handles collection of student information, course information, registration, and more, and then sends the appropriate information to the Learning Management System (LMS) like Canvas.  It sounds lie you're perhaps in a corporate environment where there is no SIS to handle that process, am I correct?

In that scenario, as it seems you've noticed, there are a few different ways you can manage enrollments in Canvas itself:

1. Through the Canvas UI - Manually create course shells as an admin and then enroll students in them using the +People button in each course.  You can paste in a list of login_ids or email addresses if you have them.  For a small-ish number of courses, this may be the way to go.
2. Using CSV files via the SIS Upload admin area in the UI - You'd need to assemble a collection of CSV files (usually at least courses.csv, users.csv, and enrollments.csv) which outline the courses, users, and course enrollments (assignming the users to courses).  This may or may not be faster/easier than method #1 for you
3. Using the API - You can do any or all of the above through the API as well if you wanted to.  There is an API to create courses, to create users, and to create enrollments.  You would have to create some kind of script or set of API commands to do what you'd like depending what you're using for source info.  I do believe there are also consulting companies that may assist with this kind of work, but of course that would come at additional expense.

I hope this info helps, even though the method you were hoping to have may not exist.  I honestly doubt Instructure is going to change the methods for creating courses/users/enrollments for Canvas as almost every LMS I know of uses the same basic philosophy.

Let us know if you have more questions about this topic in general or one of the specific options I mentioned above.

-Chris

[Repol]

The method actually doesn't exit yet. Could we create an API that may do it?

[chriscas]

Hi @Repol,

You would really need to do the "grouping" of students outside of Canvas, but there are existing Canvas APIs to do everything else you asked about (which I linked in my last post).  APIs in general are based on the structure of the application (Canvas) itself, so I don't think it's likely that a new API would be created for something like this. It would generally be the responsibility of the customer to do things like create courses and enrollments.  If you need someone to help write code to utilize the existing APIs, you could check with Instructure's professional services to see what they'd say about options.

-Chris