Adding Students to Canvas

Question

I am trying to add students to my course. I have their e-mails but every time I get to the next step and put their names in, I get an "internal error occurred" I work overseas so their emails aren't the typical yahoo or gmail.

ColtonSwapp · Answer

Hello @SharonOu

Thanks for posting about this in the Global Canvas Community!

Just wanted to pop in and ask you a little more about this.

* Do you know if the course you were trying to add the students into is possibly a Blueprint course you are syncing content to other courses with? The reason I ask is because I have actually seen this specific error pop up previously and it had something to do with the course actually being a Master Blueprint. Blueprint courses cannot include any student or observer enrollments.
* Another suspicion I had was that the email addresses you were using have not been verified by the specific user. Typically a different error messages pops up when that it the case...
* It could also be something such as a permission issue. Do you know if you have more than one role in the course you were running into this with? This error can sometimes be related to users having two course roles. When one of the course roles is missing the permission to add students to a course, it will often result in this error.

-Colton

Greg · Answer

I'm sorry to hear that you are having trouble with enrollment, @SharonOu. Here's another option: enable enrollment by URL. This is explained in a Canvas Guides document:

How do I enable course self-enrollment with a join... - Instructure Community

If you are able to do this and your students encounter the internal error message, then the best option is to contact your local Canvas or IT support team. There might be a configuration error in how your Canvas instance is connected to the internet.

James · Answer

@SharonOu

To make sure we are talking about the same thing, you have gone to the People page and clicked on +People. Then you are trying to add user(s) by Email address.

The first thing that comes to mind is what delimiter are you using between the email addresses? If you are copy/pasting the list from somewhere, it may not use commas or put them on a new line, which is required for this to work. If the list is coming from Outlook, for example, it puts semicolons between email addresses.

Does it work if you enter just one email address? If so, then it's probably a delimiter issue. If not, it may be an issue with the email. Canvas supports international students and UTF8 characters, so I would check the delimiter first.