New Canvas Course Roles Summary

Introduction to new Course User Roles

As of Mon 25 May 2026, we have introduced new course user roles in Canvas.

These are based on your feedback. This new set of roles that should work better for most people at the university.

Summary of new Course User Roles

Here are the key things to know:

1. 3 roles removed:

   • Support Staff, Student Tutor, and Guest Student have been removed. Use Admin Staff (for Support Staff), TA (for Student Tutor), and Observer (for Guest Student) instead.

2. 4 new roles added:

   • Admin Staff: same permissions as Teacher/Course Coordinator.

   • Teacher (Read Manager) & TA/Tutor (Read Manager): can view and edit grades, but cannot change course settings, manage users, or modify assignments/rubrics.

   • TA/Tutor (Non-Grading): same as the Read Manager roles, but without access to grades.

   • Student (Auditing): same as Student; can join groups and submit assignments.

3. Name change: The TA role name for the non-grading variant is now TA/Tutor (Non-Grading).

4. No changes to the base Teacher, TA, Designer, Student, and Observer roles. This is planned for EduRec use and is not assignable by staff in an academic course.

For a full breakdown of permissions for each role, see the New Canvas Course Roles Summary and the New Canvas Course Roles Permissions.

Further details on new Course User Roles

New roles

Here are the new roles.

1. The base Canvas roles are in bold.

2. The roles are colour coded, following their respective base roles. e.g.

   1. Course Coordinator and Admin Staff are based on Teacher.

   2. Student (Auditing) is based on Student.

• Current roles: 11

• Added: 4

• Removed: 3

• Previous roles: 10

* Users with removed roles in courses will retain those roles.

** Note for Guest Student: The initial proposal was to rename the role to Student (Guest). However, survey feedback about this role is that it can be removed since Observer fulfils it.

Key differences

1. Teacher, Course Coordinator and Admin Staff have the same permissions.
   ^{Canvas does not have an Owner permission.}

   1. The Support Staff role, previously based on the TA role, has been removed. The closest role to Support Staff is Admin Staff, which has higher-level permissions.

2. TA role is similar to Teacher, but TAs cannot view Gradebook history nor add/remove Teachers.

   1. The Student Tutor role has been folded into the TA role.
      ^{If Student Tutor was kept, there would have needed to be additional roles: Student Tutor (Read Manager) and Student Tutor (Non-Grading).}

3. Teacher (Read Manager) and TA/Tutor (Read Manager) have the same permissions . They are similar to TA, but:

   1. they cannot:

      1. change most settings,
         ^{This does not apply to external tools like Turnitin and Panopto. For these tools, Read Managers are treated as Teachers and can edit the tool settings.}

      2. add or remove users from the Course,

      3. add, edit nor delete Assignments, and

      4. add, edit nor delete Rubrics.

   2. they can:

      1. manage Groups (but not add or delete),

      2. add Files (but not edit or delete),

      3. create, moderate, post and view Discussions,

      4. create and update Pages (but not delete), and

      5. view and edit Grades (but not view Gradebook history).

4. TA/Tutor (Non-Grading) is the same as TA/Tutor (Read Manager), but they cannot view Grades.

5. Designer is similar to Teacher but cannot access Grades and Analytics.

6. Student (Auditing) is the same as Student. Student (Auditing) can be added to Groups and can submit Assignments.

7. Observer has read access to the course. Observers cannot be added to Groups and cannot submit Assignments. Guest Student, which will be removed, is fulfilled by this role.

Background on role limitations

1. In Canvas, the name of a role is connected to a set of permissions. If we want a new role name, we have to create it with a set of permissions. For example, Teacher, Course Coordinator, and Admin Staff are three different roles, but they have the same set of permissions.

2. Base roles cannot be deleted nor renamed. Also, some permissions in base roles cannot be changed.

3. We cannot create a role for every request. Some role requests are too specific and not useful for the majority. Having numerous roles with minor differences will make things confusing.

4. We cannot give different roles for different sections of a course. If you are a Teacher in a course, you have the same permissions for all sections in that course.

FAQs

1. I cannot assign Student (Auditing) in an Academic Course. Why is this so?
   The Student (Auditing) role is meant for future EduRec use.
   
   

2. For users with the Observer role, what does Observing: nobody mean?
   The observer role can be used for guest students who are not participating in assignments. It can also be used to observe a particular user in the course. This is not a use case we use at NUS, thus we expect that Observers observe nobody.