Can canvas be opened to students not yet enrolled?

[brennem1]

Hi,

My university currently does placement in our math classes with a commercial program. It has the advantage that it is online (so students not near our campus can take the placement test virtually). However we are considering giving our own in house exam but would need a platform for the students to take it online. Is there a way of opening up a Canvas "course" for students who are admitted to our university but not enrolled in a course, so they would be able to take a Canvas quiz placement test?

Thanks,

Matt Brenneman

[nwilson7 · Accepted solution]

 @brennem1 ‌, this is absolutely possible.  You do not need to be enrolled in any specific class/course to be added to Canvas and each course is unique so you could add students to Canvas purely for a testing course.  Really, they don't even need to be enrolled in the university as long as you have a way for manually added accounts to log into Canvas.  My institution has a main login that requires a university account so we provide outside people with OurInstitution.instructure.com/login/canvas and that serves as a backdoor into our instance. 

Please reach out if that prompts more questions as we use Canvas for this exact thing.

-Nick

[nwilson7 · Accepted solution]

 @brennem1 ‌, this is absolutely possible.  You do not need to be enrolled in any specific class/course to be added to Canvas and each course is unique so you could add students to Canvas purely for a testing course.  Really, they don't even need to be enrolled in the university as long as you have a way for manually added accounts to log into Canvas.  My institution has a main login that requires a university account so we provide outside people with OurInstitution.instructure.com/login/canvas and that serves as a backdoor into our instance. 

Please reach out if that prompts more questions as we use Canvas for this exact thing.

-Nick

[brennem1]

Hi Nick,

Thank you for this information. It will help our dept tremendously.

Matt

Matthew Brenneman

GStat, American Statistical Association certified

Department of Mathematics

Room 301.31 College of Arts & Sciences

(386) 226-6401

[Abdul_bmis]

@nwilson7 Thank you Nick for your support in finding a workaround for adding temporary students to Canvas.

I have been diligently exploring solutions for conducting pre assessment tests for incoming students .Could you please provide  guidance on how we can proceed with setting up these pre-assessment  tests without requiring individual logins for the students?

Abdul

[nwilson7 · Accepted solution]

@Abdul_bmis They would need individual logins as the tests would need to correspond to a specific student assuming you are doing this at any scale.  The logins do not need to be institutional logins if you allow for the backdoor institution.instructure.com/login/canvas. 

Every student that gets accepted to our University (does not mean they are coming, they just have accepted) gets enough of a an account to be able to access Canvas and take their placement exams.  We also have a few programs that have exams before they can be accepted and for those, I do a SIS import with their personal email accounts and add the field to have an email sent to them to create a password.  For those students, they use our backdoor to access Canvas since they are not officially students yet.  

Although not entirely secure, you could also make generic accounts with passwords and assign those to the students.  For example, tester01@institution.edu and password is something like tester01 (needs to be at least 8 characters) and then continue that pattern in some fashion.  That is harder depending on the number of students you are testing.

Hope this helps!

-Nick