Disable ability to create new user accounts?

[abunag]

We've been having a rash of faculty adding in students using incorrect email addresses, which then causes the students to have multiple accounts.  Is there any way to disable the ability for non-admins to create new user accounts?  We've tried education and adding warning messages to the "add people" page about the issue, but neither seems to have slowed this down, and now we have several hundred extra accounts in the system.  I really would like to avoid having to merge all of them with their "real" account.

[kona]

 @abunag ​, do you still want them to be able to add students, just not create new accounts? Or, are you ok with them not being able to add students to their courses?

[abunag]

If they can't add students at all, that's acceptable.  The issue is we already turned off that ability for most of our subaccounts, and they end up just adding them as observer, which then causes two problems instead of just the original one.

[kona]

Let me double-check our settings. We don't allow ANYONE other than Canvas admins to add people to courses, but I'm not sure which settings control for this.

[kona]

Under permissions for Teachers we have the following set as disabled - "Add/remove students for the course" & "Add/remove other teachers, course designers or TAs to the course."

[abunag]

 @kona ​, thanks for running that down.  Unfortunately, I don't think that would work for us.  It would mean adding in all TAs, observers, and fellow teachers into courses, which could end up being far more work than merging 500 extra accounts.  It would be nice if users could add existing users without also being able to create brand new accounts.

If no one else knows of a way to do this, I'll post it as a Canvas Idea.

[tdelillo]

 @abunag ​ - Question: Are all of your courses/users "manually" created (as opposed to imported from a student information system)? I asked because I've found that permissions can have caveats when you add data via SIS (which we do). Our teachers have every possible permission EXCEPT the "Add/remove students for the course". We allow them to add Observers, TAs, Designers. But when I masquerade as a teacher and try to add an Observer and enter an email address not found in the system, I get an error and cannot proceed:

If I tried adding the junk user "pqqq@yahoo.com" as an admin, it would let me go ahead and create the account.

So for us, it seems to be working the way you want it to work. But I'm unable to pinpoint why, other than it doesn't seem to lie within normal teacher permissions (unless, as I mentioned, it's somehow a quirk of SIS-created enrollments). Do you have any custom roles for your teachers?

[abunag]

that's interesting...we're using SIS import for the bulk of our account creation and enrollments.  When an email is entered, it just creates an account.  I only get that type of error when I enter a non-email username.  Are your account usernames also email addresses?

Our permissions seem to be the same - teachers can add other teachers/etc, can't add students.

[RobDitto]

 @abunag , at our institution we dealt with this by unchecking the open registration account-level setting. 

With open registration turned off, admins will still be able to SIS-import users; however, teachers will no longer cause a new account to be created when enrolling anyone based on an email address.  The Add People dialog will still validate pre-existing email addresses (as well as logins and SIS IDs), so teachers might not notice any difference when manually enrolling students already known in Canvas.

[abunag]

Thanks Rob!  That seems like exactly what we're looking for.  I overlooked that checkbox so many times trying to find a solution.

[tdelillo]

Yes! That's the sneaky setting. I knew there was something else we had disabled, and I was looking all over the account settings and could not see it.