Why can I not add users by name?

[BrianCuthbert]

I am wanting to create a Canvas course for a club I am sponsoring at my school, but many of the students in the club are not in my classes. Because of this, I don't have easy access to their ID numbers, making it difficult to add them to my Canvas course. Why is there not an option to add people to a course by name? It seems that this would make it much easier to invite people when creating a course.

[Chris_Hofer]

@BrianCuthbert ...

Canvas allows you to add users to a course by three different methods: Email Address, Login ID, or SIS ID.  (Your school may also enroll students in courses via SIS Import on the back-end admin side of Canvas.)  If you were to add someone by name, for example John Smith, you can imagine there might be a lot of users in the school's Canvas environment that might have that exact name, and so you'd have to search through a potentially long list of names and pick out the exact one you needed.  The three above options are unique to the user, and so those are better ways to add users to a course.

Hope this helps a bit.

[BrianCuthbert]

I definitely understand how that could be an issue, but why not at least give us the OPTION to search by name, and then if we have that issue, we can narrow it down by their ID. Almost all of my students have unique names, so it would only be a rare occasion that I would need to use a secondary identifier. As it is now, I don't even have the option to use their name, which would be the easiest method to add students.

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

@BrianCuthbert ...

Out of curiosity, are you using the FFT (Free For Teacher) version of Canvas, or does your school have a paid Canvas environment?  A FFT Canvas environment would have a URL of https://canvas.instructure.com/, and a paid Canvas environment would have a URL similar to https://SchoolName.instructure.com where SchoolName is the name of your school/college/university.  If you were using the FFT version, there may be several students with the same name, and so as I mentioned before, searching for that person based on name and then by some other unique identifier, might not be as easy as knowing a unique e-mail address, for example.  Again, most of the time, enrollments are handled by someone in the school's IT department who is a Canvas administrator...so having to enroll people manually in courses isn't really something that instructors have to be too concerned about.  I used to work at a Technical College in WI, and now I work for another College in MI.  Both schools have a process to upload students from their SIS (Student Information System) to Canvas which doesn't require going through the course "People" page...as there are other back-end ways to get students enrolled in the proper courses.

If you feel that adding students by name would be beneficial to the "People" area of a course, you could submit this as an Idea here in the Community so that folks could later vote on it and evaluate it.  There are a few documents for you to look through under the heading "Ideas and Themes" at: Instructure Community Guide - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com).

To start your Idea, go to: Canvas Ideas and Themes - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com) and click on the blue "View and Submit Ideas" button.  Then click on the blue "Submit an Idea" button.

Hope this will help in some way.

[BrianCuthbert]

We have a paid Canvas account.

I think the strange thing for me is that we use at least 2 dozen other apps/websites for our district, and every single one of them allows us to search by name when adding students to a group. Canvas is the only one that will not even give us that option.

I think I will add it to the list of suggested ideas...thanks for the help!