Course Primary Instructor

[cdellapietra]

Hi All,

I have been looking over the ER diagram and documentation for Canvas Data 2 trying to find some sort of indicator for the primary instructor of a course. In many cases we have multiple teacher enrollments for a given course, and we'd only like to report the primary instructor. Does such a thing exist?

[JamesSekcienski · Accepted solution]

Canvas doesn't have an indicator for a primary instructor when multiple users are enrolled as the Teacher. You could try to predict who the primary instructor of a course is based on course activity, but it wouldn't be fully reliable.

If you could update the method you use to enroll users to handle enrolling the primary instructor in a unique role from all other users and teachers in the course, then you could use that to determine the primary instructor from Canvas Data.  You could make it so that the primary instructor gets the default Teacher role and other instructors enrolled in the course are enrolled as a TA or a custom role based on the Teacher or TA role.  Alternatively, you could make a custom role for the primary instructor and ensure that only one teacher is enrolled using that role while all other teachers are enrolled with the default Teacher role.

Another option to consider is if the information about who the primary instructor is stored in a different system, like your SIS, then you could try to get that information from that system and combine it with Canvas Data if you need Canvas specific information too.

[cdellapietra]

Hi James,

Thanks for your reply. We do currently store primary instructor information in our SIS, which is an Oracle database, while our Canvas Data 2 database is Postgres, so it's not ideal, but workable.

Thanks for the suggestion using custom roles too, I think that may be feasible for our team. I appreciate your help.

[James]

To add to what @JamesSekcienski said, the SIS is considered the authoritative source of information and contains data that doesn't get put into Canvas. If you have a good working relationship with the people who control the SIS, then that's where the information should come from. Thankfully, I need read access to our SIS so that I can get the SIS imports prepared for Canvas. Some institutions have completely separate departments that don't play well together, so people think it's easier to get the data from Canvas -- especially if you have CD2 -- than from the SIS.

If getting data from the SIS department requires donating a kidney or thirty-two forms signed in triplicate, then I have an idea that might work.

I'll call the idea a longshot and don't hold out hope, but I'll throw it out there. If all of the instructors are created with the same role in Canvas, but the secondary instructors get added later, then you could use the canvas_enrollments.created_at field to determine which enrollment got added first.

For example, many of our health professions courses have multiple instructors within Canvas. As James suggested, the primary one is doing most of the work and you could use the canvas__enrollments.total_activity_time or .last_activity_at files to pick that out. For us, most of the others don't go in at all, but that's not guaranteed.

But for us, the primary instructor is added automatically by my code that with the same SIS import that creates the course and adds any already-enrolled students. The secondary instructors aren't listed in our SIS as instructors, they are just the other instructors who happen to teach the course. Since they are manually added later, we could use the created_at field to determine the primary one.

All of that assumes that the original primary instructor is still the current instructor. We sometimes change instructors and move sections around. In that case, we would have to rely on the SIS.

I concur about having separate databases not being ideal. Our SIS uses Informix; our CD2 uses MySQL.

[cdellapietra]

Hey James,

Thanks for your advice about using the created_at date as a means of determining the primary instructor - I will give it a shot and do some validation to test if its reliable enough for reporting.

[JimEgan]

Enrollments are a free-for-all in our instance of Canvas.  I threw up my hands/keyboard and decided that going back to the SIS for the primary instructor was the path of least resistance.  We maintain primary instructor in the EDW (external to the SIS) so that's where I'm really getting it from.