Why can I not add users by name?

I am wanting to create a Canvas course for a club I am sponsoring at my school, but many of the students in the club are not in my classes. Because of this, I don't have easy access to their ID numbers, making it difficult to add them to my Canvas course. Why is there not an option to add people to a course by name? It seems that this would make it much easier to invite people when creating a course.

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Chris_Hofer

@BrianCuthbert ...

Canvas allows you to add users to a course by three different methods: Email Address, Login ID, or SIS ID. (Your school may also enroll students in courses via SIS Import on the back-end admin side of Canvas.) If you were to add someone by name, for example John Smith, you can imagine there might be a lot of users in the school's Canvas environment that might have that exact name, and so you'd have to search through a potentially long list of names and pick out the exact one you needed. The three above options are unique to the user, and so those are better ways to add users to a course.

Hope this helps a bit.

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