My institution is reviewing the way in which we manage enrolment into our VLE, Canvas. We cannot drive this from SITS as this does not track students involved in teaching, but rather assessment. Instead on a course by course basis we enrol groups of students/staff onto courses (note we can roll over these group enrolments year on year).
In more detail our current approach is as follows:
Our identity management function brings together data from a number of different sources, including Student Systems for programmes of study, students, student programme of study enrolments and student progression, and Human Resources Information Systems for staff information. Using this data, we create groups and group memberships based on their attributes, so, for example, there is a group of students studying undergraduate physics, a group of staff associated with the Department of Linguistics, and so on. These groups are integrated into an application, the Group Enrolment Tool (GET), which creates and removes enrolments in Canvas courses based on rules. An example of a rule might be: Enrol members of the group “MSc Physics Students Year One” in the course “Introduction to Quantum Mechanics” with the role “Student”. Once the rule is established, user’s enrolments are added and removed based on the changes in membership of the groups.
We would like to understand how other university’s manage their enrolments into VLE Courses:
- Do you allow students to self-enrol in VLE courses?
- Do you enrol students and other participants manually, or do you have an automated mechanism?
- If you have an automated mechanism, could you describe the source and type of data, and the mechanism you use to perform enrolment?
Thank you!
