This article is intended for Sub-account Administrators at Florida State University. If you would like to become a Sub-account Administrator, please obtain written approval from your Dean or Department Chair and contact ODL Technical Support at [email protected].

Administrative Permissions

As a Sub-account Administrator, you are able to do the following within your sub-account:

• Post department-wide announcements that appear at the top of the Dashboard (Canvas home page) to all students, faculty, and teaching staff.
• Assign observers (academic advisors) to students so that they can monitor academic performance.
• View departmental usage statistics, including login activity, course activity, and user activity within Canvas. Learn more about Canvas reports.
• Report on attendance for the entire department (for any course that uses Canvas's Attendance tool).
• Look up any user's name, avatar picture, email address, course enrollments, and group memberships within Canvas.
• Add rubrics, traceable outcomes, grade schemes, and question banks into all your department's courses.
• Install external applications/plug-ins across all courses in your department.
• Manage account-level settings, including but not limited to the ability to:
  • Adjust the theme that is applied to all courses in your department. However, you will need to work with FSU ODL Technical Support to ensure that your new course theme maintains appropriate FSU branding.
  • Create an additional sub-account that functions like a sub-folder within your department's sub-account.
  • Access Ally Institutional Report for your sub-account.

Course Permissions

When it comes to course access and information, Sub-account Administrators have essentially the same course access and permissions that the teacher of the course has. While this does mean that a Sub-account Administrator could make adjustments to course information, it would be highly unusual for them to do so. The Sub-account Administrator role is typically given to those who function in an administrative technical support role for the department. This means that they are very unlikely to change anything in a course without obtaining the instructor's permission first.

Here is a breakdown of everything that a Sub-account Administrator can view and potentially impact in a course:

Course Communication and Collaboration

• Manage events on the course calendar and course announcements
• Create student collaborations and web conferences
• Send messages to both individual course members and the entire class

Course Enrollment Information

• Add and remove teachers, course designers, and TAs to the course
  Please note: we do not advise giving a single user multiple roles in a course (e.g., instructor has both teacher and student roles), as this will cause errors within the course site.
• View all users in the course
• View group pages of all student groups

Course Content

• Manage course rubrics and learning outcomes
• Manage (add/edit/delete) all course content: Assignments, discussions*, quizzes, course files, pages, course sections, and course groups.
  *Please note: Discussions permissions also include the ability to post to a discussion, view/edit/delete others' posts, and lock topics.
• View and link to question banks

Course Settings

• Change the course state, meaning publishing and concluding the course
• Add and remove external app configurations
• Manage alerts, meaning actions that trigger a notification to be sent to instructors and students. For example, an alert could be sent if there is no interaction between the instructor and a student in the course for seven days. These alerts are rarely used.

Course Grades and Analytics

• View all students' submitted work and make comments on submitted work
• Edit and moderate grades
• Read SIS data (on the People page and in Course Settings)
• View analytics page and usage reports for the course

General Canvas Permissions

For more detailed information about these permissions, see Canvas's documentation on account role permissions and course role permissions.