Roster Photos Update
In 2016, the Canvas team developed Roster Photos to close a major feature gap for those instructors migrating from CourseWork to Canvas. Roster Photos displays official student Campus ID card photos to help instructors put a face to a name at the start of an academic term.
In 2017, Roster Photos integrated with NameCoach (a 3rd party application) to provide student pronouns and audio recordings of their name pronunciation in addition to their photos. New or updated entries within NameCoach were picked up by Roster Photos every time an instructor launched or refreshed the tool.
For Fall 2022, will have back-end and front-end updates. To ensure you are able to view the front-end updates, please clear your browser’s cache.
What’s New?
On the back end, student pronouns showing up in Roster Photos will now be sourced from Axess (instead of NameCoach). Therefore, please encourage your students to enter their pronouns in Axess
On the front end,
- Student pronouns and name pronunciation recordings will be accessible directly from the main screen (Figure 1). They were previously accessible via a pop-up window (Figures 2a and 2b).
- Instructional staff will be able to toggle across multiple views depending on their need/interest. Views containing pronouns (1 and 3) are not printable since printouts could inadvertently reveal student pronouns to people outside of the course — which would be counter to student expectations of who could see their pronouns. The following views will be available:
- Name and pronouns (default view)
- Name only
- Pronouns only
- Photo only
- An updated guide to pronouns.


