How to create a Teacher user?

[Davidemolin]

I'm very new to Canvas and I'm still trying to figure things out.

I'm logged in as an Admin into my own Canvas environment; I wanted to create a few teacher accounts to use but I cannot figure out how to do that...

I see that there's a "People" area under my main account, where I can create new "people" (setting their email, login/pwd etc); Though, there's no place for me to specify if those user accounts are either teachers/students...

I want to create a teacher user, able to create courses etc, separate from my main administrative user but I've no idea how/where the association between a user and a "role" takes place.

Any help would be appreciated

[mzimmerman]

Hi @Davidemolin 

You don't create "teacher" accounts.  Rather, a user account gets a role of "teacher" once it is added to at least one course with a role of "teacher" within the course. 

[Davidemolin]

Thanks for chiming in!

I see that you can add the role "teacher" when adding people to a course but that's not what I want.

I want the teacher to be the one who creates the course in the first place, so how do I do that then? It looks like a catch-22 situation here...

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi @Davidemolin 

A user has to be added to at least one course with a role of "teacher" before Canvas considers them to be a "teacher".  There's not really any workaround for this.

(We have a "new faculty onboarding" course that we use to help new instructors get up to speed on Canvas, and part of the course is for them to create a new sandbox course and do some tasks in it.  However, they can't create a sandbox course if their paperwork is still pending and haven't received their official course assignments and been assigned as instructor in their actual courses yet.  The only workaround is for us to manually create the sandbox course for them...)

[Davidemolin]

@mzimmerman Thanks for the feedback. That of an "onboarding" course is actually a great idea, I'll take this approach, thank you for suggesting it!