[ARCHIVED] Teachers as Observer of specific students

[lhenson]

Our special education teachers are needing to 'observe' specific students in Canvas and view their assignments/quizzes.  I created a new Advisory role for teachers, but this gives them rights to all students and courses. I am a little concerned with FERPA compliance by giving these teachers access to everything.  I can make them Observers in specific courses, but it would be easier for the teachers to view the information by student rather than have a list of hundreds of courses.  Is there any other way to set them up to accomplish this goal? 

[KristinL]

Hi Leslie -

I have thought a lot about this, and I wish I had more help to offer. I teach at a private high school with a very small list of students who receive academic accommodations. 

My initial thought was to have your Special Education teachers use Canvas Parent. With the app, they would be able to look at several students, but only see one particular student's information at a given time. However, at this time, you're not able to see submission details. That's not ideal in your situation.

This is a lot of work on your part, but could you create an observer for each student and then use the same password for each observer-user? For example, SpEd1@domain.k12... could be used by all special education teacher to access one particular student. However, this would take a lot of time to set up AND it would be a complex book-keeping task to document which username would match with which student. This would be exaggerated more with large caseloads. The plus side is that the Special Education teachers could see exactly what each student on their caseload submits and the comments that were made by the teacher.

I'll keep thinking. I just didn't want to leave you hanging over the weekend.

I'd be happy to brainstorm and troubleshoot with you!! Hopefully some other super-friendly K12 folks can chime in too. 

[lhenson]

Thank you so much for putting thought into this for me.  We have SEVERAL students who need to be monitored, but I am willing to do whatever we can to make this work. I am kind of trying to wrap my head around creating observer accounts for each student.  Besides the time consuming work on my end, my only hesitation is that they have to login for each student to view their courses, but it might be the best and legal solution for now.

Thanks again.  Definitely now have something to ponder.

[joseph_allen]

 @lhenson  we have the same exact situation.  Special Ed and several other types of special teachers that need to monitor students grades and course work.  We do in fact set these teachers up as 'observers' of their students.  It works for the most part.    We built some special dashboards in our SIS to help create the observer / observee relationship... and to remove it when the school year is over or things change, but the bottom line is that the observer role does work in these situations.  I'd be happen to share more about what we're doing.  I also talked about it in InstructureCon presentation last year if you want to take a look InstCon16 | Deploying Canvas to Create One Learning Ecosystem in K12 - YouTube 

[tross]

 @joseph_allen ‌   so are you putting something in the SIS to trigger a record in the obervers file or are you using the API to integrate to Canvas.  We use the CSV files so we could do something similar in our SIS that would allow us to generate an observer record in Canvas for that special ed person.  We have been asked about this on a few campuses and I expect the number to increase.   Probably something I will look at for our summer changes to the import.

[joseph_allen]

Terri, the SIS triggers a record that is then loaded into Canvas creating the Observer / Observee relationship.  We are now using CSV through scripts as we found the Canvas APIs to be too slow.  CSV is much faster.

[colleen_henry]

 @joseph_allen ‌,

I would second the comments by @jcrawford - folks in my district would also love to see the process you went through to create this dashboard as well.

[ajuelmen]

@joseph_allen, would you be willing to share your process and assist me in setting this up in our district?  Thank you!

[jcrawford]

Hi  @joseph_allen ‌,

I came across your reply and video and I am in the same exact situation.  As the account admin, I am finding a huge need for our special ed teachers to have specific roles and permissions for their students only.  Your liaison dashboard is exactly what I had in mind... but better!  You said in the video that you would be willing to share some of the programming you guys used.  I would love to take a look at anything you are willing to share.  I'm also really interested in the Missing Assignment piece you mentioned, as we are seeing a HUGE need for that at both the course and account level.  Thanks for any guidance you can give or anything you are willing to send my way

[KristinL]

Hi ~ I wanted to share a feature idea with this group! I feel that https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/8649-parents-toggle-view-between-children?sr=search&searchId=b...‌ would also be helpful for support staff or teachers who observe a specific group of students. https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-11182-parents-requested-this-at-my-school-multiple-students offers a solution as well!

[turnerke]

I know this is a two year old topic, but I came up with a solution to this that I think will work.  I'm using the Free For Teachers version.

1. Create an extra section of your course, I titled mine the first letter of the special ed teacher's last name whose case load the students were on. 

2. Add the students to that section through the People tab in your course, students can be in more than 1 section, so keep them in the section they're in, and have them also in this extra section.

3. Add the special ed teacher to the course as a TA, when you do put them in the extra section only.

4. THIS PART IS KEY: Go into people, find the special ed teacher, click on the 3 dots to the right, go to "user details" and toggle them to only be able to see students in their section. 

Now when they login and go to grades, they will ONLY be able to see those students you've put into that section.  

This way, if you have students in multiple section who are on one special ed teacher's caseload, when they login, they will only have to deal with seeing their own students and not filter through all of your other students. 

Hope this helps!

[Hildi_Pardo]

I do think Canvas should consider a way to help with this.   This may not be an issue for HE, but the more we use Canvas in K12, the more this becomes a need.       In Year 1 and 2 of using Canvas in my district, this had not come up.  But now we are in Year 3, and use of Canvas has increased, so the need for for Special Ed or other Monitoring teachers is needed.     It's complicated, though.   

I wonder if there was a way that it could come from the SIS so these staff are automatically associated to the students they are assigned to?

It would be soooooo much easier if it was automated in some way.

[tross]

We have been looking at this.  We agree that the longer you use canvas, the bigger this issue.  We are considering adding a user defined field in our SIS and then sending them up in our file as observers.

[Hildi_Pardo]

Our SIS is Synergy (and our in between is Clever).     Would love to know what you come up with !

I'm not very technical with this area of things -- but can share with that staff.   Thanks!

[JolieBeth23]

I got to this topic by searching for a similar solution here in 2021. At my school, we each are advisors to a small group of students, and it's driving us crazy in Canvas that we don't have an easy way to do grade checks/missing assignment checks for our advisees, one of our roles as advisors. We previously used Blackbaud as our grade book and had one button we could click to pull up a fast report on all our advisees' grades and missing assignments. There seems to be no easy solution in Canvas, and in the K-12 environment, is a necessity. 

[brianne_loomis]

Also looking for a solution... 

We tried using an observer account tied to a specific student last year, but it is not a good solution. Not only time consuming to set up, but also ran into privacy issues this year when the teacher was still observing a past student. There is no (easy) way to remove a student from an observer account.  This year, I offered the observer by course so the permissions end at the end of year.  This is really only good for 1-1 support, not full case loads.

I would be interested as well in any solutions and to learn more about @joseph_allen's solution!  We sync daily from SIS (PowerSchool), but would be willing to learn about csv uploads if that makes this work.