Is there a way to grant permissions for a teacher to be able to add a support tech to their course as observer

[cbirdsong]

In trying to fine tune some account permissions & roles, we are wanting to give the ability for a faculty member to add a support person to their course in an observer role to help consult or troubleshoot their course, but we don't faculty to be able to add just anyone else, especially students who haven't registered. It seems currently that the permission to add/remove users from a course is an all-or-nothing permission and can't drill down to specific roles. This would be similar to allowing, say, a Microsoft tech support virtual access to your laptop but at the Canvas course shell level.

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

It is definitely possible to grant permissions for Teachers to add only specific roles to the course, such as only Designers, or Observers, etc.  The permissions settings look like this:

The primary question is, what is the appropriate course role they should use when adding them?  For instance, Designers have permission to see and edit course content, but not student data.  TAs have more or less the same abilities as Teachers.  Observers really have fairly limited access to view course content, and no ability to see discussions, assessments, or student data (unless they are set up to observe a specific student).

Of course, you can limit what role the Teacher can add to the course, but you can't limit them to only adding specific users.

[BrianLester]

What role would such a support person have within your Canvas instance? A tech support person with an admin role or a teaching colleague

A tech support person with an admin role can see the course with being enrolled as an observer.

A teaching colleague would need to be enrolled as an observer by an admin

[cbirdsong]

It could be a number of scenarios - one would be year-long temp positions we have in the department for tech support or accessibility reviews that need access to go into a specific teacher's class but not full global admin access. Another might be if a teacher wants to show a colleague how they set up their shell but not allow any changes or access to student info. We are trying to eliminate the need for more and more admins with this solution, while also not putting the burden of manually adding & removing such people all on the few admins we have.

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

It is definitely possible to grant permissions for Teachers to add only specific roles to the course, such as only Designers, or Observers, etc.  The permissions settings look like this:

The primary question is, what is the appropriate course role they should use when adding them?  For instance, Designers have permission to see and edit course content, but not student data.  TAs have more or less the same abilities as Teachers.  Observers really have fairly limited access to view course content, and no ability to see discussions, assessments, or student data (unless they are set up to observe a specific student).

Of course, you can limit what role the Teacher can add to the course, but you can't limit them to only adding specific users.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

To expand on this a bit, there are definitely options to limit what role teachers can give someone they are adding to their course.

What I don't think is possible is to restrict what users they can add in those roles as long as the users exist in Canvas.  Users don't generally have roles themselves, rather the roles are defined by course enrollments (for example, I could be a teacher in course A, but a student in course B).  We don't allow anyone other than admins to add people to a course in any role for this specific reason...  In the past we've had faculty add students in various roles, add others who were not authorized to be in a course, etc...

We now have a google form teachers can fill out requesting an additional person in their course, and then an admin evaluates the information and decides whether to add the person, reach out for more info, or deny the request.  This is done manually right now, but I think some automation could be done through Google Scripts if I had some time to learn more and experiment with them.

Hope this info helps!

-Chris