Observer pairing for advisors without Pairing Code?

[mzimmerman]

As a university, we haven't played much with the "Observer" role and our user creation and enrollment is centrally managed so we don't allow self-registration.  

However, now there is some interest in granting some advisors an observer status for some students they are advising, to keep track of course progress and so forth.  Is it possible to pair existing users as observers with students without pairing codes or self-registration?

Thanks,

Mike

[scottdennis]

Hey Mike,

Its fun to get the chance to answer one of your questions for a change...     I will direct your attention to the related comment that Peyton, the Product Manager for mobile, recently left on Canvas Parent 2.0 Update.

"Hi Bobby Pedersen! If you don't want to use pairing codes for self-registration, there are a couple other options for getting parents into Canvas. Some schools create parent accounts (or otherwise have parents self-register) in the SIS and then import those to Canvas at some regular cadence, other schools manually enroll parents in Canvas."

[mzimmerman]

Thanks,  @scottdennis ‌!  That is certainly an interesting discussion on the thoughts behind the current Parent workflow!

The task for us is not really "getting parents into canvas".  In our case, the advisors in question would already have Canvas accounts, since we create accounts for faculty and staff automatically. 

Since we don't allow self-registration, I can't see any option to create pairing codes.

The question is, how do you attach the advisors to students as observers without a pairing code?  Is it even possible?

[scottdennis]

Hey Mike,

I'm not sure off the top of my head but I'm guessing you could manually enroll advisors the way he said some schools manually enroll parents as observers.  That might not scale well though...

[mzimmerman]

Hi Scott,

Ah, you're right!  If you enroll them in a course as observers, you can link them to a student in that course.  You just can't link them to the student system-wide, in the way you can with parents and a pairing code.

Mike

[Bobby2]

Thanks  @scottdennis I'm just trying to imagine the sequence if this is the case. eg. what parents will see and step by step process.

I think this is the pathway we will be going down. 

[rake_9]

There is definitely a way to do this via API; we have used this model for one of our groups of advisors.  I'm not a developer so I don't know the details.  I believe it is a matter of pairing the advisor/parent to the student and then being sure the advisor is enrolled in all of that student's courses.

I would caution you to think very carefully before going down this path.  We are starting to develop a different solution because this model turned out to be unsustainable for us.  There is a fair amount of ongoing back-end work involved with pairing and enrolling and then un-pairing/re-pairing/un-enrolling/re-enrolling when a student changes courses or an advisor moves on to a new position.  In addition, all of these relationships show up in the People list to instructors. We have gotten some push-back from faculty about allowing observers at all, or alternately, why some students get this extra support and others do not.  And then there is the slippery slope; we did this for one group of advisors, which lead to other groups of advisors wanting this access. 

[Bobby2]

This is really helpful. Thanks  @rake_9 . 

[mzimmerman]

Thanks for the warning, Valerie.  It's definitely worth some consideration from a policy perspective as well as a technical and workflow perspective.  We just at the stages of initial investigation at this point--I was asked whether the Observer role is something that might be useable for advisors.  Initially I was thinking more along the lines of a student/parent pairing, which doesn't seem to take place at the course level or have quite so much visibility (though that of course has its own pitfalls!). 

[reynoldsn · Accepted solution]

One option would be do a data import to link the faculty advisor/observer to the student.   Doing this would then give the observer access to all the student enrollments.

[mzimmerman]

Hi Nancy,

Thanks, I didn't even notice the user_observers.csv feed format in the docs until now!

Mike

[reynoldsn]

you're welcome.   Our advisors are using the observer access to check-on their advisees.   Using the observer access thru the app (along with the notifications) has been most helpful to them.

One thing to keep in mind is 'after the data upload', they'll need to clean up their dashboards (and remove all the courses that get populated to it).