In Permissions, Separate "Add/remove other teachers, course designers, TAs, and Observers to the course" into 8 permissions

[cms_hickss]

Please change each the "Add/remove other teachers, course designers or TAs to the course" from a single setting to 6 settings.

Current:

Add/remove other teachers, course designers or TAs to the course

Should become:

• Add teachers to a course
• Remove teachers from a course
• Add course designers to a course
• Remove course designers from a course
• Add TAs to a course
• Remove TAs from a course
• Add Observers to a course
• Remove Observers from a course

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the Canvas Release Notes (2021-03-20).

[hvaughn]

This  separation is desperately needed for us. We have a "Canvas Basics" training requirement that instructors must complete before they can be enrolled in a course as an instructor.  We do not have a training requirement for TAs. That being said, we would like instructors to be able to add TAs to their courses, but not other instructors (or designers, etc.) who have not completed the training.

[kmeeusen]

I agree with this feature request. While the student focus in Canvas is wonderful and the teaching tools are effective, us poor admins still have to make the system work best for our entire campus. The admin tools are rather dismal, and typically require way too many clicks, backtracks, and re-searching for courses and users. We can't build Rome in a day, but this (and some of the other feature requests for Admin functionality) would be a great start.

We also require our faculty to be trained, but there are many other users of our Canvas instance, and the ability to better control their permissions is highly desirable.

[buellj]

Agreed - we need much more granularity on the permissions parameters.

[cms_hickss]

This item is now open for voting.

Remember: If the idea does not receive 100 votes within 3 months it will be archived. Ideas that reach the 100 vote threshold within the first three months remain open for voting.

[cbennell]

I wholeheartedly agree that permissions should be more granular. I also think the details of each permission need to be documented.

[chriscas]

I agree that there needs to at a very minimum be separate permissions allowing add/remove for each base role in Canvas.  Because we use EvaluationKit (and many other LTIs that tie into user roles within Canvas), it is crucial for validity that teachers and students only come from our SIS.  Our course evaluations are used as part of the promotion and tenure process for faculty, so it's really a MUST for us to ensure only assigned teachers are evaluated, and only by registered students.  We would love to be able to let teachers add people in an observer or TA role, but right now we can't do that and have to have all add requests go to admin to make sure the roles are done properly.

[annette_torrey]

Because of SIS integration we don't allow instructors to add/delete students. But they needed to add student mentors and tutors from our writing and tutoring center. We created a Tutor role (based off observer) to control the permissions, but now we have to manage adding all the tutors. The tutoring assignments change constantly, so this is a real pain. Granular permissions would allow us to give this back to the instructors or department admins.

[Jeff_F]

I concur and feel that if someone is given permission to add a TA/ Observer, etc. they should also be able to remove that person.  So just four.  The exception would be instructor as we want the SIS or support to handle this aspect and not instructors.  In this last case we simply would not provide add/remove instructor permissions for our instructors.

[BROEKERC]

Rationale: these permissions need to be unbundled for efficiency purposes. 

[adm-zakb]

Allowing teachers to add designers (but not add other teachers or TAs) would help to protect against FERPA violations.