[ARCHIVED] Parent/Observer Mess with Multiple Children

[cgiraud]

Our parents are in the process of setting up Observer accounts to monitor their children. We have noticed that if a parent has more than one child at the school, the observing experience is challenging. In the desktop/laptop platform, the calendar lists a huge number of courses. For a parent with three children, this means there would be as many as 23 different calendars to monitor. The student accounts are not separated in any way.

On the iPad, the platform can't support that many course so it makes an arbitrary decision about what courses to not display at all.

We really need a way for parent to observe their children separately. This is causing a lot of frustration for our parent community.

Does anyone have a solution for this mess and/or is there a way to submit this for vote?

[clong · Accepted solution]

Let's focus our efforts on making sure this feature idea gets votes!

See: ​

[wgargaro]

Thank you for this cgiraud

I was just having a similar conversation with the other Tech Specialist.  Parents are Observing more than one students and would like to have notifications set by student (one requires more monitoring than the other).  There really is no identifier on the class - so it's difficult to know which student you are looking at.  I would love to see the classes separated by student in the drop down.  Hoping you get some good ideas here.

[cgiraud]

Just submitted it as a feature request. Maybe you could watch its progress and help me elevate it to Canvas' radar for voting.

[LisaCasto]

We discussed this same issue this week. We are first recommending calendar, as that seems to work better in our model that asks teachers to use assignment and other options with due dates. We don't use many pages.  We recommend that our parents designate a color per child. So, all of Mary's classes are pink, Billy's are blue and John's are green. It seems to be an option. Also, as the calendar will only show 9 courses, the colors may help parents to uncheck and check which child they see. 

We're also having some discussions with staff who are parents about notifications.  Parents know which child needs more monitoring, and many of ours have limited their type and frequency of notifications. 

[clong · Accepted solution]

Let's focus our efforts on making sure this feature idea gets votes!

See: ​

[Renee_Carney]

Many parents have found the ​ video very helpful!

[clong]

Thanks for linking to that, it is a nice resource.

Perhaps this video could be updated to address the new UI (no global grades link) and demonstrate some of the workarounds posted here. Especially the idea of using different course colors as suggested by LisaCasto​.

[joseph_allen · Accepted solution]

I voted for this.  I think it is very important for parents to be able to choose which student they want to see, it really is a mess if they have 2, 3 or more children.  They don't know  which class is which, they get a million different notifications from Canvas.  This is a must have feature if this is to be a viable feature for K12.  And if you don't have parent access, you don't even have a viable piece of software in K12 in this day and age.  yet another reason to create a higher ed vs K12 version of the software.

[saqib]

This is the huge problem as I have three kids, I cannot check grades for each individual student. First of all, I would be very clear to say that, Canvas is the most pathetic student portal I have ever used. Checking the grades and progress of a student for any parents is a MUST requirement. How can you develop a software without giving this option to parents? 20 different courses for parents for all three kids? you guys are kidding. Canvas is a big joke!