General Canvas Course for Office that All Staff Can use

[lrodriguez31]

Hello, 

I work at a community college transfer center where we all use Canvas. I created a Canvas course for our office in which I have granted others full access to make changes. However, the coordinator recently asked if we can create a general Canvas user account so that multiple users can access it without having it been created under one person, does that make sense?

[nwilson7 · Accepted solution]

@lrodriguez31 That is technically possible but not sure it would really help you.  We did create a user in our Canvas account that we have made the "teacher" of some of our institutional level courses.  We did it mainly so it was not directly attached to any user in the event that someone left (the course would not go away but that just made things easier to find as we can search all the courses that that user is the teacher for).  Another reason we did it is so that that "fake" user can post discussions and comments and it will show as our university posting them vs me for example that most of the students have no idea who I am.  Most of these courses are also mostly static content so no one is going in a managing content or adding stuff.  

The downside though is that you could run into an issue where, for example, 5 people have access to login (or emulate if they are a Canvas admin) as that user and changes that you don't want start happening, it would be more difficult to prove who was making the changes.  An admin could run the access report and potentially get enough info to pin it to a particular user's computer but then you are involving more people.  By keeping it the way you have it now, you are able to easily see who is making changes and even with editing access, no one really "owns" the course so it is not like a Google drive that you need to worry about people leaving and content getting lost.

Hope that helps or if that prompts more questions feel free to reply!!!

Nick