welcome Aboard! and Time zone

[Carjun]

We have students from different regions. Currently, the default Time zone of our accounts is UTC, It is causing a lot of confusion among participants.  

1. I Would like to check the possibility of setting the time zone for participants while user creation. Any way to add an extra column for the time zone in the SIS file?

2. If the first option doesn't work, Previously participants used to get a Welcome Aboard! window once they click the get started button, That page has the option of setting password and time zone. (attaching screenshot) , Is this option still available? how can I enable that?

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @Carjun,

I think the 'Welcome aboard" screen may show up when you manually add someone to a Canvas instance.  When you use the SIS files, I'm fairly sure that screen is skipped as they should already have a password set up.  It seems like a great idea to have a timezone column in the users.csv file, and I would encourage you to submit that idea to the ideas area when it hopefully reopens next week.

For the immediate need, you could set timezones using the users API, but that would take someone with some coding knowledge to do.  You could also create a global announcement, including a link to the user settings page (schoolname.instructure.com/profile/settings) and informing users they should set their preferred timezone there as soon as possible.  I'd do an announcement like that each semester and leave it up for maybe a week.

Hope this helps a bit.

-Chris

[Carjun]

Thank you!