(For Admins) Viewing your unit's sub-account tree

If you have one of the Admin roles in Canvas , that is, the Local Canvas Coordinator or Unit Administrator role, you will be able to view the sub-account tree for your unit in order to search and view courses and people within it (amongst other tasks). You will also be able to grant others in your unit roles at the appropriate sub-account level. Consult the page Roles and permissions for more details on sub-account roles.

Further Canvas documentation is available on sub-accounts. Links to an external site.

Note: The option to view the sub-account tree in Canvas is currently not available in Microsoft Edge 17. This enhancement is planned for the near future.

 

What is a sub-account?

Canvas is based on organisational structures known as ‘sub-accounts’ which match the University's institutional structure.

  • The main (or root) Canvas account is the University of Oxford, which is managed by the central Canvas team.
  • Divisions, departments, faculties and colleges (‘units’) each have their own sub-account(s) (see example below), which can be managed locally, by granting individuals relevant sub-account roles.
  • More fine-grained sub-accounts (where relevant) include Postgraduate Taught (PGT), Postgraduate Research (PGR), Undergraduate (UG), ‘Shared courses’ and sub-accounts for individual Programmes of Study (PoS). This means that administrators may be given rights over only the relevant part of the sub-account structure for their unit.

 

Advantages of sub-accounts

  • You can search for and access all courses within the sub-account without being enrolled on them.
  • You can search for all people within the sub-account to check their status and enrolments.
  • You can enrol users on any courses within your sub-account, including bulk enrolment using the Oxford Groups Tool across multiple Canvas courses.
  • You can run usage reports across your sub-account.
  • You can create and manage question banks for teachers to use in quizzes within your sub-account.
  • You can grant sub-account roles to other users within your unit.

 

Note: Since sub-account roles enable viewing rights and high-level permissions across a unit’s sub-account, they should be granted and used with accompanying levels of responsibility.

 

Using the Sub-Account Browser to view your unit's sub-account

  1. Click on the Admin tool on the Global Navigation Bar.
  2. Select the sub-account that you wish to view.
  3. Scroll down and select View Sub-accounts
  4. On the first occasion that you launch this Sub-Account Browser tool, you will need to grant it access. Click on the blue text in the access message:

  1. Follow the authorisation steps, and the  Access Granted message should appear.

You will be presented with the sub-account tree. Browse down by opening sub-accounts as required.

There is a Search box to enabling searching for sub-accounts that you are authorised to access.

The mouseover shows how many courses are in a particular sub-account.

At any level, click on the sub-account to go into it. From there you can view courses, view and manage people, and use the Oxford Groups tool to enrol groups of participants onto one or more Canvas courses.