Learning Technology Services Help

What are Permissions and Roles?

Permissions control the content and features participants in a UVACanvas course site can access and use.

Your role in a site determines which permissions are granted to you. For example, individuals in the Teacher role have the ability to create and grade assignments, while those in the Student role can submit assignments.

Permissions

Canvas has many permissions that allow course participants to view, add, edit, and delete content.

For descriptions of the possible permissions, see the article Canvas Course Role Permissions (opens new window).

Roles

Roles define which permissions are granted to individual site participants. There are two categories of roles:

Administrative Roles: Individuals in these roles can add tools to a site and create and edit content in many tools. Some administrative roles also allow participants to access unpublished or otherwise hidden content and perform administrative functions such as adding other participants to a site and grading work submitted by students. The Teacher, Teaching Assistant, and Designer roles are administrative roles.
Member Roles: Individuals in these roles can access content that those in administrative roles have made visible, and upload content and submit work in appropriate tools. The Student and Waitlisted Student roles are basic member roles.

Administrative Roles

Site participants may have one of the following administrative roles:

Teacher: Teachers have full permissions throughout the site, including the ability to publish or unpublish the site; add or remove tools from the Course Navigation Menu; create course sections and groups and manage their membership; manually add and remove site participants; and create, edit, and delete content.
TA: TAs have almost identical permissions to Teachers, with a few exceptions. They do not have the ability to add, edit or delete learning outcomes; create course sections or manage their membership; or edit site participants' roles.
Designer: Designers have many of the same permissions as Teachers. However, in Grades, Assignments, Quizzes, and Discussions, they do not have access to see or enter grades. Additionally, Designers do not have permission to view course analytics, or add site participants or edit their roles. Some external tools, including Canvas' New Quizzes, Photo Roster, and Digication, do not recognize the Designer role and will not allow Designers to access them.
Librarian: Librarians have the ability to create, edit, and delete course content, files, and pages. In Grades, Assignments, Quizzes, and Discussions, they do not have access to see or enter grades. However, the Librarian role was based on the Teacher role to give the staff of the UVA Library Teacher role access to Media Gallery and Canvas Studio so they could add Media Library content stored in these platforms to course sites. This also gives Librarians permissions equivalent to Teachers in many other external tools, including Photo Roster, Gradescope, and Microsoft Teams Classes.

Note: When an official course roster from the Student Information System (SIS) is included in a site, participants on the roster will be assigned the following roles automatically:

Primary Instructor or Secondary Instructor in course roster: Teacher
TA or GTA in course roster: TA

Member Roles

Site participants may have one of the following member roles:

Student: Students have the ability to access visible or published content in tools such as Files and Modules. They can also access and submit assignments, assessments, and posts in tools such as Assignments, Quizzes, and Discussions.
Waitlisted Student: Waitlisted Students have the same permissions throughout the site as Students.
Observer: Observers have read-only access to visible or published content, as well as the assignment submissions and posted grades of students whom they are assigned to observe. For more information, see What is the Observer role? (opens new window). Many external tools do not recognize the Observer role and will not allow Observers to access them.