Teacher Enrolling as a Student

[heathersbender]

I provide PD for educators using Canvas LMS.   Some teachers have trouble accessing my PD course shell as a student/participant.  The course doesn't show up in their district Canvas dashboard.  I can see that they accepted the Canvas LMS invitation and are enrolled in my course.  Where should they look to access the course?  

[chriscas]

Hi @heathersbender,

Generally, every school/district/institution has their own instance of Canvas.  These instances of Canvas are not usually connected together at all.  If I'm a teacher at Apple High School, I'd log into Apple High School's Canvas and see the Apple High School courses I teach.  Now if you develop a training course using Banana Professional Development School's Canvas and invite me using my Apple High School email, I'd get an invite to the course in my email.  When I click the invite, it would prompt me to create a password, then let me into Banana's Canvas.  From that point, every time I want to go to your training course, I'd need to log into Banana's Canvas separately from the Apple Canvas I'm used to.  This isn't difficult, but it's something that may need to be clearly communicated to users.

Hope this helps!

-Chris

[heathersbender]

It does.  The challenge is some teachers accepted the link using their district login and now can't find the course.  Will I need to delete and re-invite these teachers, asking them to create a new login?

Thanks for your help.

Heather

[chriscas]

Hi @heathersbender,

You should just be able to give them the link to your canvas instance (blah.instructure.com), and that should allow them to login with whatever password they created when you invited them, assuming you invited them via email address and the accounts were self-created.  If an admin made the user accounts in your Canvas instance, you'd probably need to talk to that person to find out how they'd prefer the users to get in your course again.  There are quite a few variables at play here, so I've given my best guess as to your scenario, but if this advice seems totally incorrect, let us know and perhaps we could investigate alternatives.

You could also contact Canvas support about this if that's an available option for you.  They'd be able to provide more accurate info as they'll see your exact Canvas instance and settings, which members of the global Canvas community here cannot do.

-Chris

[heathersbender]

I do not have a paid Canvas account.  I use Canvas LMS instead.  I think the trouble is when a teacher's account is for their district's Canvas instance and my course is through the free version.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @heathersbender,

Thanks for the extra info.  What you're using then is likely what we call "Free for Teacher" (FFT) Canvas for your course.  So what you'd tell the faculty is that they need to login at canvas.instructure.com to access your course, and they should login with the email address you invited, and whatever password they made.  If they forgot their password, there is a link to reset it on the login page there.

Hope this helps a bit more!

-Chris