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Instructor > Course Management

Managing Enrollment

Manage Users

Use the “Students” and “Users” options to view the lists of people with access to your course. Use the “Manage Users” option to add/edit access for your TAs and mentors.

Use the “Setup Rotating Sections” option to distribute your student list into equal sections for grading assignments other than registration section. See also: Registration Section vs. Rotating Section

Automated Course Enrollment Management

For large courses, we recommend working with your university IT and/or registrar to receive regular updates of the student enrollment, automatically update student information when they switch sections or drop the course altogether. We recommend never erasing student information if they are no longer in the course (in case the registrar information has an error). Instead, we move dropped students to a special null section.

For example, the RPI Computer Science department system admin now receives on a daily feed of students per course section. We run a nightly cron job to automatically add students to the relevant Submitty course databases and create login accounts to the submission server. This greatly simplifies instructor maintenance of current course enrollement. See also System Administrator / Student Auto Feed.

Below are the instructions to manually add students who are not traditionally registered, to immediately add a student who registered late, or if the feed is not available for your course.

Add students one-at-a-time

  1. Instructors can add students to their course from the “Students” tab at the top black bar of their course page.

  2. Click on the “New Student” button in the upper right. Fill out the information requested. The User ID cannot be edited after the student is created. The other fields can be edited later be clicking on the pencil icon for that student.

  3. If your Submitty installation uses database authentication, you will specify the student’s initial password on this page and they can change it later.

    Students can change their preferred first name and their password from the main submitty page (from any course page, click on “Submitty” in the breadcrumb bar, in the top left of the screen.

    Click on the pencil icon next to your first name to change your preferred first name.

    TODO: FILL IN INFORMATION ON HOW TO CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD IF DATABASE AUTHENTICATION…

    Note: If your Submitty installation is using PAM authentication the option to change your password through Submitty is not available. Your sysadmin will let you know if and how changing your password is facilitated.

  4. If your Submitty installation uses PAM authentication…

    TODO: FILL IN INFORMATION ON HOW TO CREATE THE ACCOUNT

    TODO: FILL IN INFORMATION ON HOW TO SPECIFY INITIAL STUDENT PASSWORD

    You will need to ssh into submitty and navigate to /usr/local/submitty/config/database.json, Then edit this file by replacing the value “PamAuthentication” with “DatabaseAuthentication”. Finally be sure to save the file, if this file is read only be sure to enable write access.

Add students by bulk file (.csv) upload

  1. Instructors can add students in bulk to their course from the “Manage Students” tab from the navigation bar of their course page.

  2. Prepare a comma separated values file with 5-7 columns and no header row:

    username, first name, last name, email, registration section, preferred first name (optional), preferred last name (optional)
    • Registration section can be custom, for example NULL or STAFF.

    You can also supply just the user_id and rest of the fields will be auto-fill with the existing user data.

    TODO: IF USING DATABASE AUTHENTICATION, HOW DO WE SPECIFY THE PASSWORD?

  3. Click on the “Upload Classlist” button in the upper right. Select your prepared .csv file and press “Submit”

  4. If your Submitty installation uses PAM authentication…

    TODO: FILL IN INFORMATION ON HOW TO CREATE THE ACCOUNT

Add graders by bulk file (.csv) upload

  1. Instructors can add graders in bulk to their course from the “Manage Graders” tab from the navigation bar of their course page.

  2. Prepare a comma separated values file with 5-8 columns and no header row:

    username, first name, last name, email, grader group, preferred first name (optional), preferred last name (optional), registration section (optional)
    • Registration section can be custom, for example NULL or STAFF.
    • Grader group can be a number 1-4. For more information: see User Group or Role documentation

    You can also supply just the username column, and rest of the fields will be auto-filled with the existing user data and a default value for grader-group as ‘Limited Access Grader’ (3) will be used.

  3. Click on the “Upload Graderlist” button in the upper right. Select your prepared .csv file and press “Submit”

Student Activity Dashboard

The Student Activity Dashboard provides instructors with a powerful tool for monitoring and tracking their students’ activities on the system. By using this dashboard, instructors can ensure that students are keeping up with their coursework and reach out to them if they are falling behind.

To access the dashboard, click on the “Student Activity Dashboard” tab. You will be presented with a table of student data.

Viewing Student Information

The dashboard displays student information for various categories, including:

Sorting and Filtering Data