A solution to manually creating and maintaining a course for student use does exist, though, and several schools use it to automatically build Courses that aren’t credit-bearing.

In Infinite Campus, there are many different types of ‘Non-Academic Courses’. These courses are designed for clubs, sports, and even libraries or counselor corners and help teachers access student information they might not otherwise have access to. Some are specific (e.g., Soccer) and others are general (e.g., Extracurricular Club).

A byproduct of our approach to provisioning within Canvas is that Non-Academic Courses in IC will automatically populate in Canvas like any other type of Course. This is beneficial because students cannot decline an invitation to a course they are provisioned to; they may decline an invitation to a manually created course.

To enroll students in one of these Non-Academic Courses, you would need a registrar to assign you one of these Course Masters as a teacher and then add students to it. Within 24 hours, the Course and the students would then populate into Canvas.

The downside to this is that you’d need your registrar to assist in enrolling students so they will provision into the Course in Canvas.

However, adding students in bulk to the roster in Infinite Campus shouldn’t be too hard. Your registrar can use the ‘Requests & Rosters’ > ‘Roster Builder’ tool within IC to filter based on several different criteria, such as Name, Birth Year, or Graduation Year.

One of the most common applications of all of this is creating a ‘Counselor’s Corner’ type of Course where each counselor has a single Section assigned to them as a ‘teacher’ that contains their students. These sections are often cross-listed into a single Course, allowing each counselor to add messages to the whole school, individual sections, or even individual students.