Instructor Tools
Overview
This article provides information on adding course staff and students to your course. For other important start of semester tasks, please see https://go.illinois.edu/ews-instructor-checklist.Add / Modify Course Staff, Graders
Using the Class Tools tool on the my.engr portal, course staff can view, edit, and modify the group membership for two different course administration groups:
- The course staff group is automatically populated with the course instructor associated in Banner. Please confirm staff and TA appointments are in Banner by contacting your unit's administration office before using this tool. Course staff that are pulled from Banner can then modify the staff group to add additional instructors, TAs, etc. The course staff group is used for administrative permissions in the course (viewing and editing the rosters, editing web information, access to course file shares, etc.).
- The course graders group is a secondary group that doesn't have any of the staff permissions. It can be used to associate graders with the course, and enable access to course content (i.e. file shares) to allow the graders to do their work. If your course requires a graders group, please contact us at engrit-apps@illinois.edu.
To edit the course staff or graders, select "Edit staff":
When and How To Manually Add Students to a Course
Students who are officially registered for a College of Engineering course in Banner are automatically added to the course roster and have an EWS account provisioned for them.
Banner processing runs nightly. For example, if a student adds the course on Tuesday, they should be added to the course groups by early Wednesday morning.
When Might Instructors Need To Add Students Manually?
Instructors only need to manually add students who are not officially registered for the course and need access to computing resources provided by Engineering IT. This procedure does not officially register the student for the class.
Before adding unofficial auditors or other non-registered users to course resources, please verify that doing so is allowed under the applicable school, department, or course policies. In particular, unofficial auditors may be subject to restrictions on course participation or use of funded instructional resources, such as VMs or other shared computing resources.
Manual additions may be useful in cases such as:
- A student needs temporary access while waiting for official registration to be completed.
- A faculty member or collaborator needs access for course-related work.
- Someone is being added for shadowing, collaboration, or instructional support.
Manually added users may not be recognized by all automated systems that rely on the official course roster, so access may not behave consistently across all systems. If you have any questions about access for your auditors, please contact us via http://go.illinois.edu/ewshelp.
How To Manually Add a Student or Unofficial Auditor
Any user associated with the course as course staff can modify the class roster groups.
- Go to https://my.engr.illinois.edu/classtools/.
- Select View roster under the course heading.
- Select the term, such as Spring 2021.
- Select the section you want to associate the student with.
- Click View Roster.
- Scroll to the bottom of the roster table.
- Under Add unofficial auditor by NetID to section, enter the student’s NetID and add them.
About an hour after a student has been manually added to a course roster group, their EWS account should be ready to use.
If a manually added student later registers for the course in Banner, the roster will automatically be updated through the normal Banner process.
Lab Reservations
Software requests
View available software on EWS systems
Software requests must be tied to an academic course with an assigned CRN. We ask for a minimum of 10 business days' notice to fulfill software requests (or more for multiple software titles). Many requests are processed more quickly, but licensing issues and conflicts with our environment may cause additional delay. Please note the EWS Labs are an instructional resource; due to the terms of our software license contracts and instructional funding for EWS resources, academic research is prohibited on EWS resources.