Student/Observer Troubleshooting

[RebekahG77]

Hello there!  I am a new Canvas user, looking for some help.  🙂

I am attempting to add students and observers to my course.

From the "people" link, I clicked "+ people," then entered the student's email address.  I chose my course and "student" from the drop-downs.  This person didn't have a Canvas account, so it asked me for their name, which I entered.

I repeated this process for the observer, choosing the corresponding drop-down options.

I also linked the observer to the student while they were both still pending.

Both the student and the observer showed up in my course as "pending."  

The next time I logged in, the student's name had disappeared from my course and now the parent's name is listed as both the student and the observer.  

What happened, and how do I fix it??

Thank you in advance for your help.  🙂

Rebekah

[Bullaka]

I went through this last year and I've been trying to remember things so I can prevent the same problem this year!  I THINK what might be happening is when parents get the invitation, and they go to accept, they *may* be signing in as the student, and then that overrides the student identity, since the emails don't match??  In other words the invitations get crossed and one gets canceled out?  I'm not doing a great job of explaining it, lol. 

I'm going to (hopefully) avoid this problem by waiting until the student has accepted and THEN send out parent invites; and reiterate the importance of signing in with the matching email address!

I could be completely wrong, but to solve the problem last year, I think I ended up just getting a new email address for the student and adding him again.

But like I said, things are a little fuzzy in that we had to learn SO much last year, the details are kind of lost.

Good luck!