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[RobCGutshall]

To all

So I'm a newly minted admin.....still learning.  There's a person here who knows more than I but apparently not enough.  She "Moved" all the courses to this new school year and that part looks good.  The issue is none of the student accounts are showing up in their courses.  No students at all.  This seems to me to be a simple fix in my head but I can't figure out why it's happening.  Something like the students do not have access to this years courses.  

Any guidance appreciated

Rob

[chriscas]

Hi @RobCGutshall,

Do you know if students are usually populated through an integration with your school's student information system (SIS, like Banner, Peoplesoft, PowerSchool, etc)?  I ask this as you mention moving courses to the new school year, which seems a bit odd to me as a higher-ed Canvas admin myself.  Our courses an enrollments all automatically flow from our SIS so no manual work is needed.  If manual work is needed on the course side for your school/institution, perhaps there is manual work required for the enrollments as well.  This does work differently at almost every school/institution, and since the community here is made up primarily of other Canvas users around the world, we can speculate but won't know 100% for sure how your school/institution intended for things to be done.

We look forward to your response!

-Chris

[RobCGutshall]

Chris

   Thanks for responding.  As for connection to the SIS currently no, there is no connection.  I have initiated conversations with Instructure to facilitate that since we are looking at grade passback.  I believe the former Admin who has since moved on did everything manually.  (no grade passback) I've also opened a case with instructure and am just waiting to hear back.  I suspect the former admin used the SIS import but am unsure.  Ultimately right now if you goto admin-courses , filter by term and choose our 2024-2025 option.  we see the list of courses.  Clicking on a course and going to people only shows 5 users (Teacher and admin folk).  If you goto admin-courses , filter by term and choose our 2023-2024 option we see the courses also.  Clicking into a course and choosing people shows us all students and admin.

Hope this clarifies what we are seeing

Thanks again

Rob

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @RobCGutshall,

Thanks for the extra info.  This is going to be a really tough one to provide much help with, unfortunately, as systems and processes are so different and individualized to the school.

In general, I would agree that the former admin almost certainly did some kind of manual sis-import for the user enrollments.  The big question I'd have is whether they documented that process at all so you could repeat it.  The canvas-side of this is pretty easy (go to admin- -> sis_import and choose the properly-formatted CSV file(s)).  The complexity is in getting the data needed for those files and then generating them.  Instructure does provide the specs for the CSV files so you can see what will be required.  It's most likely that you'll need a users.csv (this creates the user accounts) and an enrollments csv which adds the users to their courses.  If there is no documentation from the prior admin, it might require some sleuthing to figure out what values were used for things like the sis_id of courses and users so you can maintain consistency.

I honestly don't know how much Instructure usually helps with this kind of thing...  I think it's usually up to the institution to do this part, but perhaps Instructure does help out some.  We've had this automated through scripts that run on a regular basis for the last 11 years, which is highly beneficial.  If you can get to that point eventually it would be great, but I know the first and most needed step is getting things up and running for this year.  If you have specific questions that we in the community might be able to help out with, please do let us know!

-Chris

[BrianLester]

Several possibilities here.

Is Canvas synced with an SIS like blackboard or Powerschool?

In what way were courses 'moved' to a new term?

If this was just changing the terms for previous courses the previously enrolled students would show up.

What mechanism are you using to enroll students? SIS sync, csv uploads?