People are adding themselves to my course without my permission

[RebeccaMontgo]

Hello,

I am admin for two Free For Teachers courses for the high school program of my homeschool co-op. I have sent invites via Canvas to each of the students. Some students have been successful at loggin in and enrolling. When I set up the courses I did not check the box that allows students to self enroll with a secret URL. Two parents have, in an effort to get info about their student's class, somehow added themselves- one as a student with an email I did not send an invite to, and another as an observer. I would like to understand how they are doing so, and ultimately, prevent it in the future. 

It would be best for my course to be able to lock this option off. Can anyone help me understand what might be happening? 

Thanks,

Rebecca

[NoahBoswell · Accepted solution]

Hi there @RebeccaMontgo ,

Free for Teacher does not provide you with the ability to disable Observer accounts. Parents can sign up as an observer and link their account to their student's account to see how they are performing in your class. 

When it comes to the parent that joined as a student, I'm honestly not sure how they joined your course in your scenario, but usually it is because they likely used the same invite URL as their child. The only way to prevent parents from joining the course as a student would be to disable the invite URL and the join code that you may have enabled. But, you cannot prevent parents from creating an observer account and linking it to their student that is in your class.

Best,
Noah

[RebeccaMontgo]

Hello @NoahBoswell,

Thanks for your response! As I continue to look into this issue with my course, I have discovered that it's possible that my parents are adding their student's email address in Ways to Contact and then Canvas assumes they are the same person. I now don't think that people actually added themselves to my course without my permission. Rather, I think that when I attempted to add a high school student to my high school course, Canvas assumed that the person was actually that student's parent- maybe because the parent is already a "student" in a youger sibling's course. (In our homeschool co-op, only parents interact with the courses. We use this platform for our younger grades only for sharing files between parent homeschoolers. Maybe we have set this portion up in error? This is our first year using it.) 

I am still trying to separate a parent with one email address (who I would happily have as an observer in my class) from their high school student who needs to participate in discussions and post assignments in her own name and with her own email address. 

Do you have suggestions for places to look within Canvas that may contain the answer to this question? Maybe there is a place in the parent or student account that they still have both their email addresses? 
Thanks again for your help,

Rebecca