SIS course enroll and cross-listing

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harrison
Community Novice

I"m new to Canvas and trying to figure out what is best way to handle enrolling users into course sections.

We plan to automatically create course shells for all Banner courses (CRN numbers) in a term.  Some instructors teach multiple sections of some courses and wish to have one course with all students instead of individual courses.  Cross-listing is the obvious way to handle this.  I don't know ahead of time who wants what cross-listed, so plan to allow instructors to cross-list their own courses (is there a better idea?).  The question arises on how to handle enrollments into courses.  It may start out with students enrolled in each course, then the instructor cross-lists.  How do I ensure the student enrolls from that point on (after the cross-list) are enrolled in the section and not the orig. course shell?

Bruce Harrison
University of Tennessee at Martin

1 Solution
tdelillo
Community Champion

All enrollments live in the sections, not the course shell. The How do I use cross-listing in an account? guide explains this pretty well. When you cross-list, you are moving the section into the "parent" course shell you're using for all the content. So it doesn't matter where the section is, new enrollments will be added to it. If you cross-list the ENGL-1301-002 section into the shell for ENGL-1301-001, and a new student enrolls in section 002, he will be added to the section that now lives in the 001 shell, so from his perspective (and the teacher's), he's been added to ENGL-1301-001 course, if that makes sense.

Our Banner-to-Canvas processes are handled by our programmer, so I don't have the details on how it was originally set up, but if you are starting with each CRN having its own course shell with one section in it, all the documentation (such as How do I cross-list a section in a course?) should make sense.

By the way, we allow instructors to do their own cross-listing (although it can be a little confusing so we're often called upon to assist) and it works out fine. Occasionally we have to de-cross-list things that were done in error, but it's a minor issue.

By the way, part two: You CAN do cross-listing in Banner and automate the cross-listing in Canvas, but we've had so many glitches with it since the beginning that if could do it all over, I'd make it a 100% manual process.

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