Add created course to all users automatically.

[ChrisB125]

Hello,

I'm sorry if this in an obvious question but I'm trying to find an answer and struggling:

One of our members of staff has created a course and published it. It has now been decided that all of students and staff should be able to access this course from a tile on the dashboard when they sign into Canvas. 

I have admin rights to Canvas but this is something I've never done before and I'm not sure where to start. 

Does anyone have a link to a scenario like this so I can do some reading on it? or perhaps a rough idea of the steps I need to take some I can investigate? 

Our default tiles have been the same for ages and I think the teachers just throw  new courses up as and when they need them. 

Thank you

[NoahBoswell · Accepted solution]

Hi @ChrisB125 ,

You are not able to auto-enroll all students in a course unless you are doing this through a connected SIS or the like. However what you can do is make the course visibility public, and then add it to the public course index (this also needs to be enabled at the account-level) and students can access / join the course as they wish off of the 'all courses' menu and by clicking 'browse more courses'.

I hope this helps!

[melodyc_lam]

@ChrisB125 Welcome! I do this through a SIS Import from our data warehouse for courses, so it can be done without a SIS. You just need to be able to access the SIS import system and ensure that ALL users have a SIS ID.

Here are the guides I use for this:

How do I import SIS data to a Canvas account? 

How do I format CSV text files for uploading SIS data into a Canvas account?

You need to produce an Enrollments.csv file. I leave this up to you as an exercise.

I also leave up to you an exercise to figure out how to push the import on a nightly basis to keep up with new students/staff. You can do this many ways -- script a job to push the file up to Canvas overnight through the API, SFTP setup, etc. 

If you do this through a SIS import, the course automatically gets favorited and put into the Dashboard.

You can also do this through the API, depending on how many users you need to enroll. For a district my size (140K students, 20K staff) we use SIS imports as that's more efficient to do.

The only other thing I would warn about is that if students/staff use the Canvas Inbox to message in the course, it will message the teachers -- so you may want to think about how to ensure 'teacher' access to the course without actually having a teacher in the course.

[dbrace]

Hi @ChrisB125,

Continuing on with what @melodyc_lam said: "The only other thing I would warn about is that if students/staff use the Canvas Inbox to message in the course, it will message the teachers -- so you may want to think about how to ensure 'teacher' access to the course without actually having a teacher in the course."

At my institution we have created a custom "student" role and we have both "Conversations - send messages to entire class" and "Conversations - send messages to individual course members" turned off for that role. For that specific course, we enroll faculty/staff/students into the course with that custom role.

-Doug