Manually adding students to a course before an SIS import

[kbarclay]

Sometimes our registrar's office, or the IT admins, delay either adding students to a Canvas course through the SIS after a formal registration process and the semester starts. These students contact our Canvas support team and say they don't see their course, can we add them manually. We've had a policy of not adding students manually only allowing students that have formally registered and added via the SIS import, but what would happen if we did add them manually, then the SIS import occurs? Are they added again (two instances of them in a course)? or does it replace the manually entered student with the SIS imported version and potentially wipe out any completed assignments and grades for that student? Any other bad effects of doing this? 

[gnoack]

HI @kbarclay 

You'd need to discuss this with your IT and registrar folks.  A lot of this depends on how they are added, what system they are using.  As well, your institution may not have given you (faculty?) permission to add students.  Generally, it can cause a lot of the issues you mentioned.  

[kbarclay]

I'm head of our Academic Tech department and we manage Canvas so I know about permissions re: adding students (we don't let faculty do that) I just didn't know the consequences if we admins did it, then an SIS synch occurred.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @kbarclay 

As a fellow Canvas Admin for the past 9 years, I don't think there is a "one size fits all" answer to the question you're asking.  What would happen will vary greatly depending on how your SIS/Canvas sync is setup.  Sometimes an SIS sync will replace all enrollments (teacher/student) with whatever is in the SIS, so your manual additions would come back out again.  This could potentially work differently for faculty and student enrollments.  It's also possible that your sis sync looks at the enrollment history of a student and sends the last action (this is how ours works).  In that case, most manually added enrollments would remain, but if that student had registered and then dropped the course, our sync would deactivate the enrollment each run because the last enrollment action in the SIS was a drop.  I'm not sure how much you know about your SIS sync process, but I'd say the first step would be finding out more about it.

That being said. I can say pretty confidently that if you manually enroll an account, and then that same account is enrolled via SIS at a later time (with the same role), essentially nothing would happen.  If you manually created a different account for these users, then their SIS account was later enrolled, that would cause a lot of confusion because assignments/discussions/etc would be split between two users, and the gradebook would be wrong as a result.

Hope this helps a bit (or at least shows the complexities involved)

-Chris

[kbarclay]

Thanks Chris, this does help. I'll contact our IT SIS admins and see what our process is in that regard.

Cheers!
Kent