How to Identify Which Admin Added a Student to a Course?

[Aagam_Shah]

Hi everyone,

I have a question regarding user management and tracking admin activity within our LMS.

If a student is manually added or invited to a course by one of our admins, is there a way to identify which specific admin performed that action? We have multiple admins at our institution, and we’d like to ensure accountability and traceability.

Also, in case an unauthorized user is added to a course, how can we audit the system to determine who added that user and when?

Any guidance on where to look (e.g., admin logs, user activity reports, etc.) or best practices for monitoring such actions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance!

[dbrace · Accepted solution]

Hi @Aagam_Shah,

This would involve several steps from different areas:

1. find the enrollment (can also be seen in the "Membership" area of a user's page in a course) details for the specific in the specific course (consult with https://developerdocs.instructure.com/services/canvas/file.all_resources/enrollments or https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-view-user-details-for-an-enrollment-in-...
2. in the enrollment details you should see "created_at" (that is the date the enrollment, including the invitation to join, was created)
3. take that date and convert it to a "friendly" format (e.g. from 2025-07-11T16:15:00Z to Friday, July 11, 2025 at 12:15 PM ET)
4. for each admin user account, go to their page views and see if they were in that specific course at that time

I hope this helps.

-Doug

[dbrace · Accepted solution]

Hi @Aagam_Shah,

This would involve several steps from different areas:

1. find the enrollment (can also be seen in the "Membership" area of a user's page in a course) details for the specific in the specific course (consult with https://developerdocs.instructure.com/services/canvas/file.all_resources/enrollments or https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-view-user-details-for-an-enrollment-in-...
2. in the enrollment details you should see "created_at" (that is the date the enrollment, including the invitation to join, was created)
3. take that date and convert it to a "friendly" format (e.g. from 2025-07-11T16:15:00Z to Friday, July 11, 2025 at 12:15 PM ET)
4. for each admin user account, go to their page views and see if they were in that specific course at that time

I hope this helps.

-Doug

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @Aagam_Shah,

In addition to the approach @dbrace provided (which is probably the simplest out of the box way to do things, especially if your admin team is small), you could look at setting up a Live Events feed to a server which would log almost all activity.  You could store that data somewhere and then use that source data to look up something like this.  I think many people use AWS and Splunk for this, but I don't really have much expertise in this area other than the general awareness of the possibility.

I hope this helps a bit!

-Chris