Add a new user to your Canvas course

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Overview

The Canvas People tool shows all the users enrolled in your course. Officially enrolled students and faculty of record are added to your roster automatically via an integration with SIS. There are options in the People tool to search for users by name or role, as well as to add, remove, and change the role or section of individual users. Only manually enrolled users can be deleted or modified in the People tool; all changes to officially enrolled students and instructors must be processed in SIS.

Basic instructions

To add a new user to your course in Canvas at Indiana University:

  1. From the course navigation menu, choose People.
  2. Select + People.
  3. If you're adding someone with an IU username, choose the Login ID radio button. Alternatively, if you're adding someone using a guest account, choose the Email Address radio button.
  4. In the text box, add the person's IU username (not email address), or a non-IU email address for guest users. You can add multiple users (separated by commas), but only if they all have the same role.
  5. From the Role menu, choose the appropriate role.
    Note:
    Students who are not officially enrolled in a course must be added with the "Instructor-Added Student" role. For more, see Permissions and roles in Canvas.
  6. If your course has more than one section, choose the desired section. When adding teachers or AIs/TAs to multi-section courses, use the Can interact with users in their section only option to control whether they can interact with all students or just their own sections.
  7. Select Next. The system will validate the usernames you entered.
  8. Select Add Users.

Add Guest accounts or group accounts

To add a new user to your course, that user must already have a Canvas account at IU. Canvas accounts are provisioned automatically for all IU students, faculty, and staff; however, they are not provisioned automatically for IU Guest accounts or group accounts. Instruct the owners of these accounts to create their Canvas accounts as follows. Once the Canvas account exists, you can add it to your course using the instructions above.

  • Guest accounts: Guest account users create their Canvas accounts by logging into Canvas with their Guest account credentials.
  • Group accounts: IU group account owners should email the UITS Support Center to request Canvas accounts for their group accounts.

For more about creating Canvas accounts for IU Guest accounts or group accounts, see Access Canvas at IU.

Add users after the end of a term

The People tool is automatically locked when the term for your course ends. However, teachers, TAs, and designers may change the course end date at any time. To do so:

To learn how to perform common tasks in Canvas, consult the Canvas Guides.

This is document bcwe in the Knowledge Base.
Last modified on 2023-12-19 12:00:01.