Attendance Roster

[lrodriguez31]

I started my Canvas course in January for our transfer center at a community college. We generate the roster for data throughout the semester to see how many students have joined. Is it possible to filter the roster after a specific date so we can document newly added students? 

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi @lrodriguez31 

The course roster itself can't be sorted or filtered by enrollment dates.  In fact, there's not really even an easy way to see the enrollment dates from within the course.

However, using the Canvas APIs, you can download a list of enrollments in json format that includes the date of enrollment, as well as lots of other useful information like the last activity in the course, the current grade, etc.

There is a page describing a bit about the enrollment API at https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/enrollments.html#method.enrollments_api.index but to put it simply, as an instructor you can connect to the API by logging into the course and looking at the URL, which will be something like

https://[my school].instructure.com/courses/[numeric course id]

The enrollments API is a "get" API, which means you can easily access it from your web browser.  To get the enrollments for the course, insert "/api/v1/" after the server name, before "courses", then add "/enrollments" to the end, i.e.

https://[my school].instructure.com/api/v1/courses/[numeric course id]/enrollments

What you get back will be in JSON format, but there are tools around to convert JSON to CSV.  There are also browser plug-ins for Chrome (and presumably other browsers) to format JSON on the screen so that it's a bit more readable.

Hope this helps!