Is it possible to suppress course invitation emails?

[bergs]

We have a summer institute that enrolls its attendees in, on average, about 10 Canvas courses to be completed over three weeks. The institute has about 40 courses in total, so not all attendees take the same 10 courses. The organizers add students manually through the People page of each course.

Their users have complained about the confusion from receiving a flurry of 10-ish course invitation emails at the start of the institute when the courses are published. What the institute organizers would like to be able to do instead is suppress these course invitation emails and send the attendees a single email to invite them to log into Canvas via their registered email address. The attendees would then accept their course invitations from the Dashboard.

Is it possible to suppress these course invitation emails? Does anyone know of an alternate workflow for this situation? Many of these users would be new to Canvas and would need to register for accounts, so that may complicate matters further.

I found another question on the forum which suggests that it's possible to use API calls to create users and add them to courses without triggering invites, but I'm not certain if our University System root admins will be receptive to developing an API tool, so I'm hoping there's a workaround using the UI.

Thanks for reading my question!

Scott Berg
LMS Administrator
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

[rmurchshafer · Accepted solution]

Scott,

If you are adding users to a roster from inside the course, there is no way I am aware of to prevent the invitation email to go out.  Your API suggestion would work but there is a simpler way for your admins to do it.  In the Admin area you can batch enroll people in a course with a simple CSV file and no need to bother with APIs.  Here is a page documenting what those files look like; take a look at the Enrollments.csv section https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/file.sis_csv.html   A lot of those fields are optional, if you look at the sample below the real core data needed is simply:

course_id,user_id,role,section_id,status
E411208,01103,student,1B,active
E411208,13834,student,2A,active
E411208,13aa3,teacher,2A,active

If you don't have admin access you'll need to get one to do this for you, but it's not that difficult for an admin to do.  I do it all the time for special use courses where we need to "quietly" enroll people for a course not tied to our SIS.

Creating accounts is a different issue can can be solved in a similar manner if needed by uploading a users.csv file also referenced on that page.

Good luck,

Rick

[bergs]

Hi Rick,

Thanks much. Our root admins have the SIS Imports menu option disabled for us field admins, so I'll have to lobby them to either give us access to it on certain sub-accounts or see if they are willing to process CSVs we provide. Your information was super helpful! Thanks a ton!

Best,
Scott

[rmurchshafer]

Good luck with it Scott.  Just so you know, the SIS import option is only available within the root account not within sub-accounts.  So depending on your structure it might be more likely you need to have one of your full admins do it.  I know at my school I wouldn't give out that permission to many because of the potential for really messing things up.  True story, back in about 2011 or 2012 I batch deleted all of our summer courses during an active term when I was new at using the SIS Import tool.  Oops. Thankfully it was easy to bring them back and no data was lost but to this day I still get a little nervous whenever I manually use the SIS Import.

Rick

[bergs]

Hi Rick,

Our root admins have offered to work with me to import the prescribed CSV files as needed. Apparently, they've already been doing this process for other universities in our system; hopefully that means the hard lessons have been learned long ago! They advised us to start with a small batch to keep our cleanup small in the case that the results don't match our expectations. 

Thanks again for your help!

Best,
Scott