Generating Parent/Observer accounts from the SIS

[brian_mullins]

At Beaverton School District we've been syncing Parent/Observer accounts from our SIS for several years. Many times, we've been asked how to do this, so I thought I'd go ahead and document it here. Then I can refer to this when asked in the future. Also, I'm eager to hear from the community your thoughts on our method.

We use Edupoint's Synergy as our SIS. I'm not able to share any code here publicly that shows table structures, etc. but if you'd like some guidance, I can provide that via private messaging. 

The general idea is as follows:

1. Gather the parent information, including what students they are to be connected with, from our SIS.
2. Include the parent account information in the USER.CSV file.
3. Include the parent/student link information in the USER_OBSERVER.CSV file.
4. Uploaded these files via SIS Imports

Q) How do you determine which parents/guardians get included?

A) We rely on 2 things:

1. The parent/guardian has Education Rights on the student. This is cut and dry. We would never grant access to persons that do not have a legal right to the student's data.
2. They have an active ParentVUE account. ParentVUE is the parent-facing application that is part of our SIS. We also do Online Registration/Verification for all students, which requires a ParentVUE account, so that is taken care of for almost all parents. 

Once the two items above have been met creation of a Canvas observer account comes easy.

Q) How do you enroll parent/guardian from ParentVue? 

A) With a simple query against the SIS database we can generate the fields needed for the USERS.CSV file. In our process this parent information is combined with staff and student user information and load them all a the same time.

Since BSD uses Synergy's Online Registration, at least one parent for each family will have an active ParentVUE account. To build the parent's account in Canvas we simply use the same user name they provided for ParentVUE access.

It's important to send 'canvas' as the authentication_provider_id if your parent accounts are not in your SAML provider. Ours are not, although I do dream of a day when our parents are in Active Directory and we are managing them end-to-end.

Passwords are sent as blank/null. Users would not be able to log in until they walk through the password reset process. Here's a link to our instructions for parents to do that parent reset: https://www.beaverton.k12.or.us/departments/teaching-learning/future-ready/canvas

Q) How do you connect students and course to the parents?

A) This is where some real magic happens! Instructure saves a lot of work by providing this process.

The USER_OBSERVERS.CSV file's whole purpose is to connect a parent to a student. It's a simple format, requiring only student ID and Parent ID. This simple relationship sets the parent to be observing A WHOLE student. Here's what that means:

If you are manually connecting parents to students within a course you have to do that manually for each student and each parent FOR EACH COURSE! When connecting students with parents in the USER_OBSERVERS.CSV file the parent is associated with the student SYSTEM WIDE!!! So, each time a student gains (or loses) an enrollment in a course the parent does the same! Magic!

And that's really all there is to it!

I know I've gotten a lot of tips and help form this community, so I'm hopeful that this helps some of you!

[vassallon]

This is the same process that we use in Eagle Point thanks to the previous advice we got from @brian_mullins.

It works great and helps keep the single source of data to your Synergy SIS.

[KelleyCamp]

Oh, this is brilliant! Thank you! We've been trying to figure out how to do something similar in our district. 

[RobG247365]

@brian_mullins  - are you prepending anything to the observer account id like in the post below?  Just wondering how you handle observers that are or could become staff at some point.  We are getting ready to set this up and currently, we instruct staff to have a separate observer account using their personal email address.

obs_parentid

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/K12-Canvas-Users/Observer-accounts-Bulk-creation/td-p/175938

[brian_mullins]

@RobG247365In our case, the SIS ID's used for our staff and students is their district ID (student number for students, employee ID for staff). For Parents we are just creating them using the GUID assigned behind-the-scenes by our SIS (Synergy). If I were going to start over, I would have pre-pended STU, STF or PAR to them to make it easy to tell them apart on the data side.

[kmallen]

@brian_mullins 

Hi Brian,

Do you know of a way to limit the observer sync to one term? In our testing, we found that this method adds someone to any open/active course, and we leave our courses open for an extra semester to allow for students granted an incomplete to finish.

Thanks!

[MrsLauraMetz]

Hello, I just want to say this solution has been brilliant! In addition to this information, we have turned off the ability for parents to create their own accounts directly in Canvas. This is an essential step in ensuring that all accounts are generated through our Synergy data only, preventing unauthorized account creation. We also removed the "Need a Canvas Account" option from the parent login page: https://charlescounty.instructure.com/login/canvas.

Parents will be asked to "validate" their parent account using the directions (https://www.ccboe.com/canvas). This has been tested internally and externally and the process works. We also are including this information in the parent webinar we are creating.

I want to thank Beaverton and Brian for sharing about this process! It aligns with how we handle student data and access to student data! We did have to work with Synergy and pay for technical consulting on both ends to get the data connect but it was well worth it!

The only issue we are having now is that the Canvas Parent Phone App redirects to our SSO login page after you choose our district. We have reached out to our CSM for support with this!

We disabled the ability to generate pairing codes at the course and account under Course Roles, since this will also lead to account creation outside of Synergy. 

This article does a good job of explaining the ways observer accounts can be created. 

Then we set the "Self Registration" option to "Disabled" that takes away the ability to create the account on the parent log in page.

[nwilson7]

@MrsLauraMetz Not sure what you use for SSO so this very well may be a moot point but we use Auth0 which allows slightly different log in pages depending on which tool is hitting the SSO.  So, anytime Canvas triggers the SSO login, the page as a link to "Log in without our university email" which redirects to the Canvas login (what you are calling the parent login).  While not perfect as some people still try and ignore the fact they need to click that link, it has helped a ton.

-Nick