[ARCHIVED] Can I create temporary students for a Training Course?

[angela_vanbrugg]

I am teaching a short interactive session this summer for staff from my school and neighboring schools on the capabilities of the Canvas program for online and blended learning. The course will have to be taught over Zoom, and I would like to create a course in which I could demonstrate some of the features of Canvas. However, since there will be staff from other schools and I will not know who will be attending my session until that day, most of these staff will not have a Canvas account when they walk in the door. And I have 50 minutes. Is there a way to create "dummy" or temporary accounts so that my "students" will be able join the class and participate in, for example, a discussion or quiz, if only for that day? I am an admin on our school's Canvas account.

Thank you for any ideas you could share with me!

[James · Accepted solution]

 @angela_vanbrugg  

You can create guest user accounts through the web interface, but then need to confirm an email address if you do it this way. 

What we do is use a SIS import to create the users and enroll them in the class. When you create users with a SIS import, the email address is considered good and they don't have to validate it.  The emails don't have to be valid ones, either. You could number them sequentially with patterns like "guest001@<your domain>" or "training2006-1@<your domain>". Pick something that will never be used by a real student. Canvas will probably try to email them at some point depending on their notifications and what you have them do, but the email will bounce and Canvas will stop trying.

You can specify the password as part of the SIS import. You do have to have a SIS User ID for them. Since they're not real users, you can make up something that you are sure will never be a real user ID.

This lesson from the Canvas Admin Guide provides more information: How do I import SIS data to a Canvas account? 

We regularly use this process for a college center that has students that are not assigned college email addresses. We have a single sign on system, so those students are not able to use the normal login page. We direct them to <instance>/login/canvas and then they bypass our single sign on that would require a legitimate account and they use the account and password internal to Canvas. We also have Canvas login configured as a second authentication source so that this will work.

[angela_vanbrugg]

Thank you for this information! I think this will really help me make this training more effective if they can get in and play around with it!