In Canvas LMS, is there a quick way to get a list of the invited/added students?

I'm looking at a course where the instructor went hog-wild and invited almost all of the students with all of the alternate email addresses they could find for them. This leaves me with a roster with most of the students added 2, or sometimes 3 times (with different emails), most of them in "Pending" status. The instructor asked me for a list of all of the invited/added students, and there doesn't appear to be a clear path to do so.

There are 338 (or so) of these. I could click the stacked-dots menu on each and select "User Details", then copy and paste the email address there, for each of these, but that is going to be an extremely time-consuming (and tedious) task.

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Accepted answers

Chris

Hi @dacarter,

I don't know of a quick way to do that in the native Canvas web UI. This can be pretty easily done using the Canvas API though if you're comfortable reading JSON output… You can use the Courses API | Instructure Developer Documentation Portal to get pending enrollments like this: https://schoolname.instructure.com/api/v1/courses/coursenumber/users?enrollment_state[]=invited&per_page=100 (this will get the first 100 results, you'll need to add "&page=2" to this for the next 100 results, then change the 2 to a 3 for more, etc).

I hope this helps a bit!

-Chris

All comments

Chris

Hi @dacarter,

I hope this helps a bit!

-Chris

reynlds

If you want to stay in the GUI, a "Provisioning Report" for Enrollments in your term should have the info you need.

dacarter

Apparently, the Provisioning Report will only provide info on those who have accepted an invitation. I pull that stuff into Power BI for my weekly reports, but "Pending" accounts aren't "fully created/active", so apparently that information isn't needed for my reports (even though I'd like to have it)…

dacarter

[This post was intended to be a direct reply to Chris' Reply above]

dacarter

This particular API call does provide the list of all invitees, but it doesn't provide any more information than (for example) the Gradebook export. The missing part is an email address/login ID used to invite/add the students.

Chris

Hi @dacarter,

Apologies the API didn't quite meet your needs. I wasn't exactly sure what you were after in this (just a list of names vs list of emails). I did some more digging and found some additional inconsistencies with this API that aren't necessarily documented (that I can find), but are likely intended…. Depending on exactly what;s going on in your situation these may make the task impossible with this API, but someone else may have other approaches…. I'll detail here…

The API lists users in the course, which is a good start. I gave you the code to filter the list down to the invited status, which also seemed good at the time…. What I have found with more testing today is that the API only returns invited users who already have a Canvas account for your instance, so if the faculty member was inviting brand new people with no account, they don't seem to be listed at all.

The API does return a user_id for each user, which could us used to do another lookup to get emails. Using the Communication Channels | Instructure Developer Documentation Portal API, you can get a comprehensive list of emails associates with that user. If a user has more than one email associate with their account, you won't know which one the teacher actually used for the invite, but I don't know how important that is to you.

You could chain the 2 API calls together with something like Postman or Python (or a host of other ways) if you have a bit of experience in this area.

This still may not be the complete list you see in the Canvas UI because of the potential users with no account, but it's about the best path I can think of right now.

-Chris

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