Canvas Access & Enrollments

A user must have UIW credentials to access Canvas. When a new student is accepted to UIW through Admissions, or staff and faculty are hired through Human Resources, they'll receive communications providing them access to Cardinal Apps. Canvas is an option to choose in Cardinal Apps, although not everyone will see Canvas as an option right away.

Information Technology provides support for issues with access, passphrases, and Cardinal Apps. Contact the Help Desk at (210) 829-2721, helpdesk@uiwtx.edu, or use the Service Portal to submit a ticket if you have UIW credential issues. The Help Desk will ensure your request gets to the appropriate person.

Student access to Canvas depends on their course enrollment.

Faculty and staff have access to Canvas after receiving their UIW credentials, but they will see an empty dashboard with a message they have no courses until they have enrollments. Once faculty and staff are enrolled in Canvas courses, as either Teachers, Students, or in another role, their dashboard view will change accordingly.

Note: How UIW users get access to courses in Canvas is covered further along in the proceeding tiles.

Academic, support, and sandbox courses are the three main types of courses available to faculty. Many faculty use Canvas for more than teaching their academic courses and it’s important to understand the different types as they are managed in unique ways.

Academic Courses

Academic courses are those managed through the Registrar and entered in Banner. Banner feeds information to Canvas several times every day to both create courses and manage enrollments of instructors and students.

Support Courses

These types of courses are not managed through Banner. They are handled manually by the person requesting the course. Support courses are used in a variety of ways to support the academic efforts of the university. If graded assignments and other Canvas features are not necessary for your situation, Microsoft Teams is an alternative to using Canvas. MS Teams allows groups of users to chat, videoconference, share files, and more. You can contact your instructional designer to explore options that best meet your needs.

Sandbox Courses

Sandboxes are blank courses created by request for faculty and staff to use for training, practice, testing features, and building Canvas components outside of courses where students are enrolled. 

Step 1: The Registrar creates the schedule

A few months before a new term, the Registrar creates the schedule of classes with instructor assignments for the upcoming term, and the information is entered into Banner.

Step 2: Banner communicates with Canvas

60 days before the start of the undergraduate term, Banner begins communicating course and enrollment information to Canvas. Canvas uses the information sent from Banner to create the academic course shells and enroll the instructors with Teacher access.

Step 3: Ongoing communication between Canvas and Banner

If there are changes to the instructor, departments update the information in Banner. Banner continues to communicate with Canvas several times daily to update the course enrollments throughout the term.

If you need to edit or build a course earlier than 60 days out, request a sandbox course. The sandbox course will be empty; you can import your academic course content to edit it there. Once the next academic term courses are available, you can import the edited Sandbox content to your new academic course and have a head start.

How are users enrolled in academic courses?

Instructors of record and student enrollments must be managed in Banner. Canvas imports Banner information several times each day. Users added through Banner cannot be edited or removed by the Canvas teacher role, these changes must be made in Banner.

Instructors can manually add roles other than students to their courses to share content and collaborate with colleagues.

Banner is a system that manages data for the university, while Canvas is a learning management system (LMS) that allows you to provide instruction online. A feed is created to allow Banner to communicate with Canvas. The process runs several times each day to cause changes made in Banner to update over in Canvas. However, the feed is not an immediate connection. When a change is made in Banner, the update will occur after the next time the feed runs. It may take several hours for your changes to be seen.

Important Note: The Canvas course SIS ID is built with information in Banner. Specifically, the subject code, course number, section code, part of a term, semester abbreviation, and 2 digits for the year. If the Banner feed has already been run to create Canvas academic course shells, changes made to these details in Banner will cause Canvas to create a new course shell. Contact the Canvas administrator if you have additional questions.

After a term ends, the feed connecting Banner and Canvas is turned off. Your Canvas course becomes "read-only" and is retained for the academic record with the enrollments that existed at the end of the term.

Before the term ends, an instructor can edit the Canvas course participation end date in the course Settings to extend the ability for existing enrollments to continue activity in the course. 

Read-only is the state of a Canvas course after the participation end date has passed. This date can be proactively changed by the instructor before it passes. After the end date passes, contact the Canvas administrator to request a change.

Read-only for students: Students can see all materials and grades but are unable to post, submit, or interact with the course, teacher, or students in any way.

Read-only for instructors: Instructors can see all materials and copy them to another course, view grades, and manage course files, but are unable to make edits to pages, discussions, announcements, assignments, quizzes, grades, settings, or add new users.

Read-only for guests: This can be set up through the Observer role, another type of read-only role. Enrolling a guest with an observer role allows access to the course without being able to affect any course data or participation. When paired with a student, this role cannot submit work on behalf of the students they observe, but they can see student grades, assignments and events, and course interactions. Instructors can generate a pairing code for a student or link a student to an observer in a Canvas course.

Important Note: If you collaborate with other instructors on courses, you can only add them to your course before the participation end date passes. Once a course end date passes, you can request assistance from the Canvas administrator.