In Canvas, all users must be enrolled in a section—including students, instructors, teaching assistants, and other staff. When requesting a registrar-affiliated space, your course will have at least 2 sections: a “base” section for the instructor and the registrar-affiliated section(s) for students. The instructor’s base/default section allows the instructor to interact with any section that’s eventually added to the course site.

You can view section enrollments in your course on the People page (in the Section column) or the Sections tab within Settings. Understanding the differences between these sections is especially important if you have more than one section/roster in your course.

By default, the instructor will be enrolled in the base section when the course is requested. This base section will be the title of your course site and will begin with the semester and rubric. In the screenshot below, this section is named “Fall 2021-CHLH 101-Introduction to Public Health-Section AL1”.

You may notice that the names of the sections are similar. To reduce confusion, you may want to change the name of the base section to something like “Instructional Team,” “Manual Users,” or something more meaningful to indicate that the section does not include all students in your registrar-affiliated class. To edit the name of this section, see the How Do I Change the Name of a Course Section (Instructor Guide). 

In a registrar-affiliated course site, students will automatically be added to their registrar-affiliated, CRN section—which may be referred to as a SIS (Student Information System) section. The name of these sections will begin with your course rubric and will also contain the CRN. The name of this section cannot be modified, and you cannot remove users from this section. In the screenshot below, the first two users are students that are enrolled in the SIS-generated section called “CHLH 101 AL1 Fall 2021 CRN33648”.

How Can I Use Sections in My Course?