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.
On this Page
This page will address the following information:
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 get started?
To learn more about how to use the Photo Roster, please reference:
- Photo Roster Interface Overview
- People Tool versus Photo Roster
- How do I find my student’s residential college?
- How do I review my students’ name pronunciations and pronouns?
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.