The Oxford Group Enrolment Tool (GET) employs Oxford SITS data and can be used to bulk enrol students onto courses in Canvas or create re-usable, bespoke groups of students (or staff) to enrol across multiple courses. When courses are 'rolled over' using the Manage Courses tool for the next Academic year with the 'include groups' option selected, all rules will also be rolled over.

For rules that are linked to a student year group, new rules will be created with the year automatically updated. For rules that are linked to Ad Hoc Groups, rollover will create a new versions with the subsequent rules named numerically (2, 3, 4, 5, etc).

These duplicate rules will continue to work as expected, but will increasingly clutter up the list of rules. Therefore, if you wish to delete or edit these duplicate rules, the following explains how.

1. Rollover using 'include groups'

During the rollover process you will find their is an option to select include groups. This means Canvas will rollover all rules that have been setup within the Group Enrolment tool.

Where a GET rule has employed Oxford SITS data to bulk enrol students onto one or more courses in Canvas, the rules will be updated to include data for the selected Academic year. This can be really timesaving and useful, especially if you have multiple groups of students enrolled in a course, because the year will be automatically updated for every group.

Before rollover

After rollover

2. Deleting duplicate rules

Where a GET rule uses an Ad Hoc Group to enrol people in courses, for example a group of Admin staff is added to a rule for a specific group of courses, course rollover with 'include groups' selected will create a new, 'duplicate' version of the rule for the new set of courses, rather than adding the new courses to the existing rule.

Academic year 24/25 (before rollover)

Duplicate rules academic year 24-25 updated 2.png

Academic year 25/26 (after rollover)

Duplicate rules academic year 25-26 updated.png

In practice this works successfully year on year, but there can arrive a time when these rules need to be 'tidied up'. This can be done by deleting older rules if you are sure that the people in the Ad Hoc Group no longer need enrolments into the courses contained within the rule.

The delete rule option will be available at the level where you created the rule (eg. account level or course level).

Delete Duplicate rule at account level.png

You will be asked to confirm your choice.

3. Consolidating (tidying up) rules

If you wish delete an older rule but to add some or all of the courses from it into a single current rule, there are some actions to consider.

The Group Enrolment Tool won't allow you to do this* unless you either:

Delete the previous rules. This is fine if you are are happy for the enrolments to be temporarily removed until you have added the courses into the single, remaining rule.
Rename the Section in the previous rules. This is useful if you still want to reference the courses in the previous rules before deleting them and retain enrolments while making the updates.

*This is because the Group Enrolment Tool only allows there to be one rule that enrols the same group users into the same course/section with the same role.

To rename a section in a previous rule.

1. Edit the rule at appropriate (account or course) level by clicking the pen icon.

Edit Rule updated.png.png

2. In each of the rules to be deleted, edit the Section Name, e.g. change "LCC Course Administrators" to "LCC Course Administrators Backup" then 'Save' and wait for them all to sync.

Section name (original)

Section name (edited)

3. You can then edit the single current rule (that is being kept) and add any of the courses from the obsolete rule (before it is deleted) into this current rule and Save. The recommendation is to do this bit-by-bit, i.e. add some then save, then add more and save, etc.

Current rule (edit)

Current rule (add courses)

4. Once all the Courses have been added to the single current rule and syncing is complete you can then delete the obsolete rules for which the Section names were edited in step 2.

Other Guides

Oxford Groups (The Group Enrolment Tool - GET): Guides to using Canvas at Oxford

Oxford Groups (GET): Using Ad-Hoc Groups: Guides to using Canvas at Oxford