In Permissions, Separate "Add/remove other teachers, course designers, TAs, and Observers to the course" into 8 permissions

Please change each the "Add/remove other teachers, course designers or TAs to the course" from a single setting to 6 settings.

Current:

Add/remove other teachers, course designers or TAs to the course

Should become:

  • Add teachers to a course
  • Remove teachers from a course
  • Add course designers to a course
  • Remove course designers from a course
  • Add TAs to a course
  • Remove TAs from a course
  • Add Observers to a course
  • Remove Observers from a course
This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the Canvas Release Notes (2021-03-20).

70 Comments
cms_hickss
Community Coach
Community Coach

For this idea, please remember to follow:

The first step to getting Granular Permissions was completed with the Permissions: New Interface.

sara_samples1
Community Participant

also.  Observers should be able to remove THEMSELVES.  

millerjm
Community Champion

 @sara_samples ‌ - The idea is for this to be granular so if this is an important function for your institution, then perhaps "remove self from course" would need to be a separate permission?  Feel free to post a use case here and if they ever work on it, they will have that information to keep in mind as they develop this functionality.  

cms_hickss
Community Coach
Community Coach

communityteam‌ I believe this one may have been updated incorrectly unless you you are stating that it will not be reviewed as part of the note that was left over here: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1527-more-granular-permissions-for-admins?messageTarget=all&st... 

Note: Way back when (2015) it was requested that we breakup each permission into its own Granular Permission Idea. So there are more than 10 of them that all relate back to the original idea: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1527-more-granular-permissions-for-admins?messageTarget=all&st... 

donna_lummis
Community Participant

I don't understand why Instructure is changing course on this issue. As it stands now, we have to manually enroll every Teaching Assistant and Student Instructor into every course because we can't take the chance that our teachers will not enroll these users with the wrong role. We need every "student" and "teacher" to be enrolled by our Registrar because these roles filter into EvaluationKit for course evaluations. Designing granular permissions of this kind is not an unreasonable request for an LMS. Please reconsider putting this back on the road map for 2019, especially as we were originally informed this update would be part of a 2-tier permissions restructuring project completed this summer. 

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

cms_hickss‌ &  @dlummis ‌

Thank you so much for your comments.  We know that the permissions work is important to many!

Permissions remains a priority.  You can find the most current information and status at https://community.canvaslms.com/community/ideas/priority-granular-permissions 

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

Thanks for linking to that one, Susan.  I've updated it, for it is not currently being worked for Q3.

millerjm
Community Champion

I agree with cms_hickss .  This appears to be at the heart of the changes in https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1527-more-granular-permissions-for-admins?sr=search&searchId=c...

We were told in https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1527-more-granular-permissions-for-admins?sr=search&searchId=3...‌ to break it out into many separate (shall we say, granular?) feature ideas.  

See Canvas Permissions and Granularity Feature Ideas‌ for the many, many feature ideas submitted related to either new permissions or breaking up existing permissions to allow for more specificity.  

If this particular idea isn't being going to be worked on, then what is actually going to be worked on as part of granular permissions? 

Adding or deleting other non-students in a course can have major implications, as given by examples in all of the comments and today in a comment to this post by  @dlummis .  It's important to have these granular both by the type of role, and by the action allowed for each.  

Given the way that permissions currently function in Canvas, many of us either need to deny users the ability to do something or give someone the ability to do way more than we would prefer, which comes with a serious talk with the user about what buttons they should not click on.  

cms_hickss
Community Coach
Community Coach

Well rats!

But thank you for letting us know.

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

I know.. 😞

Appreciate you, Susan!  You help us keep tabs on all these permissions things!  Love your passion for this subject!