Add teaching assistants to your course

Last updated: September 22, 2023

All official instructors of record are automatically enrolled in Canvas courses based on the official time schedule. If you want to have additional instructors or TAs added to the course, please contact your department’s Time Schedule Coordinator to have them officially added.

You can manually add other faculty, TAs, or observers that you want to have access to your course with a UW NetID. Learn more about working with people without a UW NetID.

Protect student privacy: When adding people to your course, and any time you engage in any course-related activity that may expose student information, it is critical to be aware of FERPA guidelines. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) of 1974 protects the privacy of students’ education records. Generally, the guidelines mean that the University and its employees may not release or share a student’s educational records, or information from a student’s education records, unless it has the student’s written consent to do so. Some exceptions to this general rule can be found at FERPA for Faculty and Staff. It is important that you understand when it is appropriate and allowable to release information from students’ education records to third parties, such as faculty, staff, parents, and other students.

Follow these steps to add people to your course:

  1. From within your Canvas course, in the course navigation, click People.
  2. Click Add People.
  3. In the Add People dialog box, enter the person’s UW NetID (not their email address). You can add multiple people with the same role at the same time.
  4. Select the appropriate role. If you select teacher or TA, and your course has multiple sections, you can limit the added person’s access to grading only their section. To do so, select the Can grade students in their section only check box.
  5. Click Next.
  6. The UW NetIDs will be verified. If no errors are found, and you are done adding people, click Add People. If you want to add more people who will have the same role, click Start Over.
  7. You will be asked to acknowledge the FERPA statement by selecting the checkbox next to “I understand.”
  8. Click Confirm.
  9. In the list of people in your course, pending appears next to the name of the person you added.