Managed Accounts

[Maria]

Hi everybody.

I'm new in this group and also new to Canvas.

We have recently installed Canvas (open source) in our institute and
I'm a bit confused with the administrator interface regarding "Managed
Accounts". It would be useful to have some glossary with the
terminology used in Canvas, but I cannot find any. Can anyone please
help me in understanding what exactly are the two items under Managed
Accounts
appearing in the administrator interface.

Thanks a lot.

Maria

[Cody Cutrer]

Accounts is the term for the organizational structure in Canvas.  A "root account" is the parent account for an institution, such as XYZ University.  Accounts can have sub-accounts. I.e. ABC College would be a sub-account within XYZ University.  A Managed Account is simply an account you have permissions to manage.  For a default Canvas install, you'll have two managed accounts - the default account (probably named for your institution), and Site Admin.  The Site Admin is a special account for giving users permissions to manage settings related to the Canvas install, such as delayed jobs, plugin settings, and error reports.

Cody Cutrer

[Cody Cutrer]

Sure.  There are several settings that only apply at the root account.  One of those is the ability for regular users to create courses, since the Create a New Course button shows up on their dashboard, and there is no way to know which sub account to create it in.  Courses created in this manner are always placed in the "Manually Created Courses" sub-account (that will be automatically created if it does not exist).  Of course, Admins can always create a course anywhere in the hierarchy in the Managed Accounts interface, by navigating to the correct account first.

As for courses/users not showing up in sub-accounts after the course has been moved, I'm guessing you don't have Delayed Jobs running.  In the Managed Accounts area, it will show all "associated" courses (i.e. courses in this account, or any sub accounts, including courses that have been cross-listed).  When creating a new course, the associations are created automatically.  However, when *changing* a course, the associations can be much more expensive to calculate (because the course could be full of users now, which also need all of their associations updated), so it is run as a background job.  See the Automated Jobs section of the Production Start tutorial (https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/wiki/Production-Start) to get these running.

Cody Cutrer

On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 10:25 PM, Maria <conce...@ipm.edu.mo> wrote:

Thanks again for the info. I set some sub-accounts accordingly and created courses within those sub-accounts. However, it seems the "Create a new course" button at the sub-account level is not working. I've tried to move the courses as well, from the root account to a sub-account, but when I go into the sub-account, it says "there are no courses in this sub-account". The same is happening for users. Although there are some teachers and student in the course, when I click the button "Users" at the admin level, it says "no users found". What could be wrong? Could you please help? 

Thanks for your attention.

Maria

[Maria]

Thanks. Now, users are displayed in the admin side, courses also
appear, but not all of them, which is strange.

We are trying to set Canvas in this way:

1. creating sub-accounts for each subject in our institute
2. setting teachers as administrators of the corresponding sub-
accounts (enabling them to create courses and sections)

What is happening is that when the teacher tries to add a course
within the sub-account, the new course doesn't appear. It only works
if the course is created within the dashboard and then it will be
placed under 'Manually-created courses" and not within the
correspondent sub-account.

Also, this course created by the teacher will not appear in the admin
side.


Another problem we are facing is the SIS import. Every time we try to
upload a csv file (even a very small one), the import hung and we have
to stop it.

This is really troubling, because we would like to further our testing
by inviting teachers to experience Canvas, but we cannot advance
without having the system running smoothly.

Thanks again for your help.

Maria

[JT Olds]

To me this still sounds like you don't have delayed jobs running. What
does /etc/init.d/canvas-lms status say?

[Maria]

The status is as follows: "delayed jobs running, pool PID:24929"

Right now, we managed to set different administrators for each sub-
account. The administrators can create courses and assign teachers and
students to them. The weird thing is that those courses (created
within the sub-accounts), from the root admin side do not show within
the sub-account, but appear under the root account. Is this the
correct setting? For me, they should display under the correspondent
sub-account.

Another issue is that the root admin has full access to all courses,
meaning he can change the contents, add pages, publish it, etc. Is
there any way of granting these type of rights just to the teachers
who run the courses?

Thanks for your help.

Maria

[Cody Cutrer]

Courses will show up in all associated accounts - i.e. a course in a sub-account will show up in each parent account all the way up to the root account.

As for permissions - if you click permissions on the left side of the accounts page, and then click "Manage Account Level Roles", you can create a new role with limited permissions - i.e. only Manage (add/edit/delete) Courses.  Then add admins to this role, instead of the default "Account Admin".  Also note that permissions do cascade down the tree, so if you can create courses in the root account, you can create courses in all sub accounts.

Cody Cutrer

[Maria]

Thanks a lot. This feature to create custom roles is really good for
us, it matches exactly what we need. :)

Regarding sub-accounts and courses, everything is working now as it
should, which is wonderful.

What we couldn't find yet is how to set the public courses index page,
in order to present all courses within the Institute and allow
students to self-register in their courses. Could you please advise in
how to do this? Thanks again.

Maria

[Zach Wily]

Maria,

The public course index has not been implemented yet. As of right now, you would need to host the list of courses for self-registration somewhere else.

-- 
Zach Wily

[Maria]

Oh! :( Any idea when this feature will be available?

Thanks!

Maria

On Oct 25, 10:42 am, Zach Wily <z...@instructure.com> wrote:
>  Maria,
>
> The public course index has not been implemented yet. As of right now, you would need to host the list of courses for self-registration somewhere else.
>
> --
> Zach Wily
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Monday, October 24, 2011 at 8:40 PM, Maria wrote:
> >  Thanks a lot. This feature to create custom roles is really good for
> > us, it matches exactly what we need. :)
>
> > Regarding sub-accounts and courses, everything is working now as it
> > should, which is wonderful.
>
> > What we couldn't find yet is how to set the public courses index page,
> > in order to present all courses within the Institute and allow
> > students to self-register in their courses. Could you please advise in
> > how to do this? Thanks again.
>
> > Maria
>