Course Primary Instructor

Question

Hi All,

I have been looking over the ER diagram and documentation for Canvas Data 2 trying to find some sort of indicator for the primary instructor of a course. In many cases we have multiple teacher enrollments for a given course, and we'd only like to report the primary instructor. Does such a thing exist?

JamesSekcienski · Accepted Answer

Canvas doesn't have an indicator for a primary instructor when multiple users are enrolled as the Teacher. You could try to predict who the primary instructor of a course is based on course activity, but it wouldn't be fully reliable.

If you could update the method you use to enroll users to handle enrolling the primary instructor in a unique role from all other users and teachers in the course, then you could use that to determine the primary instructor from Canvas Data.  You could make it so that the primary instructor gets the default Teacher role and other instructors enrolled in the course are enrolled as a TA or a custom role based on the Teacher or TA role.  Alternatively, you could make a custom role for the primary instructor and ensure that only one teacher is enrolled using that role while all other teachers are enrolled with the default Teacher role.

Another option to consider is if the information about who the primary instructor is stored in a different system, like your SIS, then you could try to get that information from that system and combine it with Canvas Data if you need Canvas specific information too.