At a Glance

This guide for teaching teams outlines the process that you must follow to add a guest who needs teacher-like access to a Canvas course. Visiting Mentors or contracted Instructional Designers are a good use-case for this.

If your guest already has an active Kerberos account, you can skip to Step 4.

Process Overview

  1. Faculty or Primary Course Admin sponsors a Kerberos account: Follow MIT’s process to sponsor a Kerberos account.
  2. MIT creates a Kerberos account for the guest. The sponsor receives an email from IS&T indicating that the guest’s Kerberos account is ready to be created. The guest must follow the instructions in an email they receive to finish the Kerberos account set up.
  3. MIT Sloan creates a Canvas account for the guest. Once MIT creates a Kerberos account for the guest, MIT Sloan automatically creates a new account in Canvas for that guest within 24-48 hours.
  4. Add the guest to the Canvas course. Anybody on the teaching team can manually add the guest to their Canvas course with the appropriate teacher-like role using the Membership Tool. See How to Use the Membership Tool in Canvas for step-by-step instructions.
  5. The guest can login to Canvas and access the course. To login to Canvas, the guest should do the following:
    • Go to https://canvas.mit.edu/ in their web browser.
    • Click the MIT Students, Faculty and Staff button.
      Screenshot of Canvas Login Screen
    • Login using their MIT Kerberos credentials.

Tip: When adding a guest with a teacher-like role to a Canvas course, review the roles carefully to ensure you are giving the appropriate level of access and permissions to interact with your content. See How to Manage Your Canvas Roster for details.

How to Get Support

Sponsoring a Kerberos Account

Using the Membership Tool

Tip: If your guest is new to Canvas, Instructure provides 24/7 end-user support as part of MIT’s Enterprise license by phone or chat. To learn more, see How to Get Help with Canvas.