How do I batch add students to a course section?

[kay_shenoy]

I teach a large enrolment course and my role on Canvas is Instructor. I would like to be able to create sections within the course and add students to the sections easily. As of now, the only way I can do this is by going to people, clicking on each student's name and assigning them to a section. This is extremely time consuming when I have 300 students. I see that this was discussed in earlier forums, but as far as I can see there does not seem to be an efficient way to add multiple students to a section. Does anybody know how to do this?

Thanks, 
Kay

[Hildi_Pardo · Accepted solution]

Hi Kay,

There is not a way to do it, and especially not without System Admin rights.

You can see here:  https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Question-Forum/Batch-add-students-to-a-section/td-p/69141

If the students had not already been enrolled, and you were manually adding them, then yes -- you could create the Sections first, then add them in batches (by section), and you could select the Section at that time.

Someone posted this Idea and you can Add to the Rating and add a comment to help boost it:  

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Idea-Conversations/Batch-add-people-to-sections/idi-p/369953

Thanks!

[grue1]

Hi Hildi,

Thanks for your post. I'm new to Canvas and will be an admin when my school transitions to Canvas from Blackboard this fall.

I need a way to batch-add new users to a course. These students will not be in our SIS, and I'll have about 500 users to add and enrollments to process in 10 or more course sections this fall. 

Has a solution been found for batch-adding students to Canvas and course section enrollment?

Best,

Gina Rue

Instructional Designer

LMS Administrator

Valparaiso University

[stimme]

@grue1 As an administrator, you will have access to the SIS Import framework. An users CSV & enrollment CSV could be used to create these enrollments. But an alternative approach, which would allow you to reserve the SIS Import framework for information in your SIS, is to use the Enrollments API. Using a scripting language to enroll a batch of users works well (and it can bypass the invitation step). If you are a Python fan, you may like the canvasapi package. For enrollment creation, I just use a shell script with curl.

[grue1]

Hi Stimme,

Thanks for the info and examples, but I  haven't done any coding in a lon time, so I'll be collaborating with our IT department and share this with our "scripting master!"

Greatly appreciate your time and resources. Have a great one.

-Gina

[kay_shenoy]

Thank you! I added my rating and comment to the idea that you linked above. 

[DukeEgr93]

Has there been any action on this?  As an instructor with a large course, I would ilke to be able to create Sections that I can then tell the TAs to use when grading various assignments.  Specifically, I want to break the class up into Group A, Group B, Group C and Group D.  Sometimes, each TA has a group; sometimes, a TA will have two groups.  I sync Canvas with Gradescope so the sections in Canvas would make it much more efficient to find the students in Gradescope; Gradescope can't create sections, it can only follow along with what Canvas does.  Having to do this one student at a time is...cumbersome.  I am not an admin so cannot use the scripting solutions that have been proposed.  It *feels* like there should be a batch add - Sakai had one, for instance.

[stimme]

@DukeEgr93 One way you might be able to divide up the enrollments that you already have (likely created by your institution's student information system) is to give students secondary enrollments in custom sections. If you have permission to add sections in your course Settings > Sections tab, you can use the People tool's +People button to assign second enrollments in four batches. You could get a spreadsheet showing all students' Login IDs by exporting the Gradebook. Then decide who will go in Subsection A. Click +People, select the ID type you'll copy from the spreadsheet, select the correct role and section, then copy and paste all the relevant IDs, click Next, and Confirm. Repeat for the other sections. This could be less work than using Edit Sections for every student.

Caveat: I don't know if Gradescope will work well when each student is enrolled in the large section and a subsection, but the subsections could be useful filters in Canvas Grades and elsewhere in Canvas.