Student Community Roles

[willmoin]

Hi, 

A member of our Student Experience team is looking to launch an ongoing project whereby a group of students will be recruited to help co-curate materials/activites for other students on the theme of effective study practice. The member of staff is exploring a few platforms but has asked about the possibility using Canvas for this purpose. We've seen this page and it's given us a bit of inspiration: https://www.instructure.com/resources/blog/capable-co-creators-how-foster-student-led-communities-lm...

Question is if there are a suitable selection of permissions available for us to suggest a new 'Student Community Leader' type role. Has anybody got anything similar?

Thanks, Will (Liverpool, UK)

He wonders if there is the possibility of having a new 'Student Community Leader' role introduced in Canvas?

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @willmoin,

Reading your description here, I think what I'd do would be to create a course for this project.  I would enroll the student curators into that course as teachers, and other students as students (or make it available generally to the institution or public).  If you wanted the curators to be able to add things to actual courses, that would require them to be enrolled in all of those courses or have at least limited admin access, either of which would cause data access/privacy concerns here.

What do you think of this idea?

-Chris

[willmoin]

Hi Chris, thanks for this. Just got back from a couple of weeks annual leave so my head is a bit foggy but what you suggest is definitely part of the solution and a possible consideration of the problem too. My initial aim was to put in a request to our IT for a new role (when we got Canvas we wanted to bring in a new VLE allowing us to provide lots of alternative forms of teaching and engagement like this) but when I started to look into it a bit further I wondered if the permissions available would afford us what we need.

I think this would definitely require a new Canvas course  - a hangover from Blackboard here is calling them 'pseudo courses', but essentially an adhoc created Canvas course, away from our normal academic module (course) creation process, generally sitting outside of normal taught courses - so no risk of assessed work. But with having such a space and with some students enrolled as teachers, and other students as students, my colleague who was working on this idea also saw that those student-teachers would have access to the People area and this would also reveal potentially sensitive info about the student cohort.

So the backup option that we've used previously is having a 'prototyping/staging' version of the course where the students-teachers will develop the content and then this is then transported into a final course where they are students. We'd probably go with this but it feels a bit one step removed for students, also we'd like them to be able to co-ordinate activities if they want to (no reason why they may need elevated permissions to be a leader in a discussion board activity though!). 

I'll try to map out what we need and see how far is achievable with the current setup, a possible process, but it would also be good to think about what the ideal solution could look like. It's good to mull things over a bit, thanks for getting back to me! I'll post back what I come up with.

Best, Will

[chriscas]

Fantastic, it sounds like you're well on your way with this and know a lot of the steps (or at least the ones I would take as well).

As for the role, if you're wanting to avoid the students content creators from seeing things like the +people button, or more user details on the people page, your local Canvas admins could certainly create a new role based on either the teacher, TA, or designer roles for this purpose.  It's always hard to give exact guidance on what the permissions for that role would be, but I'd start it with the same things a teacher has, then start to remove things you're concerned about one by one and making sure everything they need to do can still be accomplished.  You and your admins can reference the  Canvas Course Role Permissions - Instructure Community - 387080  guide for more detailed info about course-level permissions.

Hope this helps!

-Chris