Join Button Link for Groups + Importing Students to Groups

[akdev]

Hello! We are currently using Canvas as a student activities platform at our institution. We have multiple courses with student groups (so students can be a part of more than one group), and students join the groups they are interested in through the "People" tab. To import existing mailing lists into their specific groups, we have manually been adding students to the group (which, as you can imagine, is quite time consuming!) 

As such, I have the following two questions:

1. Is it possible to generate a link that students can click to automatically join a certain group? Ex: a certain club has a link they can send out to their members that will auto-enroll them in the Canvas group for their club.
   
2. Is there an easier method for importing students? We have tinkered with the import option to no avail, since there are students in multiple groups and it throws an error upon uploading the CSV provided by the import wizard.

Let me know, and thank you!

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @akdev,

I think this might be much easier if you create courses for the activity groups, rather than using groups.  If you created individual courses for each activity group, you could use the self-enroll link options (found under course settings -> more options, as long as you do not give the course an sis_id).  Students would be able to join and leave the courses as they please, and you could also enroll specific users through the SIS processes just like a regular course, if you wanted to.

Using groups, I don't know of a way to provide links to join groups.  You may also be seeing issues with the enrollment CSV because for groups, the student would have to be enrolled both in the home in the course and then a group in that course.  if you try to put a student in a group without them being enrolled in the course, I believe that will fail.

Hope this info helps a bit and gives you an idea for a possible alternate approach.

-Chris

[Code-with-Ski]

By using a separate course for each student organization, you could also consider using the Course Setting option to include them in the Public Course Index to provide an option for students to browse available student organizations they can join.  

• How do I include a course in the Public Course Index? 
• How do I view my institution's Public Course Index as a student? 

As for the error you are receiving with the group imports, do you have each group in its own Group Set or do you have all the different groups under one Group Set?  I think students can only be enrolled within one group within a group set.  So, to allow students to join multiple groups, you would need a separate Group Set for each one.

[akdev]

We initially had each club as its own Group Set, but we found that students could join multiple groups labeled as "Student Groups" so we consolidated the groups into that section! Perhaps that's why the issue is occurring.