Canvas @ Yale

Photo Roster: Overview

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The Photo Roster tool is a Yale-developed tool available to Instructors and TAs to provide enhanced features that are missing from the Canvas People tool, such as providing information like their photo, major, year, college, and email address.

The Photo Roster tool does not replace the People tool when it comes to adding / removing users in your course. For a full description of the differences, please refer to our help article People Tool versus Photo Roster.

If you receive an error when loading the Photo Roster tool, please try a different browser. You may need to adjust your browser settings to allow 3rd party cookies.  

It is recommended to not use Safari or Microsoft Edge when using the Photo Roster tool.

Why Use the Photo Roster?

The Photo Roster supports and provides a wide variety of demographic information that can be valuable to you as an instructor / facilitator of a course.

  • View additional information to learn more about your students
  • See the enrollment status of your course participants (officially registered, manual enrollment, or temporary visitor)
  • Includes photos of your students
  • Download an offline list of your students to communicate with students outside of Canvas. This may be particularly useful in case of any service interruptions.

Use Cases for the Photo Roster

A non-exhaustive list outlining what instructors can use the Photo Roster to facilitate include:

  • Connecting student names with faces using their photos
  • Identifying student major, expected year of graduation, and residential college information
  • Seeing a top level view of how many of each course role types you have in the course
  • Downloading copies of your Canvas enrollment as a PDF or CSV file

How do I use the Photo Roster in my Canvas course?

What will my students see?

Unlike the People tool, which students can view and see a limited display of information about the users associated with the course, students are not able to view the Photo Roster tool at all. The Photo Roster tool in the side navigation does not appear for users with the student / visitor / guest student / auditor role in any course.

For more help with the Photo Roster, please email [email protected]

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