[ARCHIVED] Disciplinary Process -- Set Student Enrollment Status to Inactive

[dbrace]

** Sorry for the long prompt.  I am trying to give as much information ahead-of-time as possible.  The actual question that I have is in bold-green-italicized text in the fourth-to-last paragraph (not including the comment that I made at the end). **

I am my institution's Canvas system administrator and I work in our Department of Online Learning. We started out piloting Canvas during the 2018-2019 academic year and the 2019-2020 academic year is the first time we are exclusively using Canvas.

We are a Banner institution and it is administered by our Information Technology Department. I work with our IT Department's Enterprise Applications Team to extract/export Banner data so that it can be transferred/imported into Canvas.

We have Banner to Canvas jobs that are scheduled to run Monday through Friday at 8 AM, 12 PM, 4 PM, and 8 PM. The job creates a single ZIP file with CSV files inside of it for users, courses, sections, and enrollments. The ZIP file is uploaded to our Canvas SFTP server and it starts to be processed at quarter-after-the-hour. The job is usually finished in a little more than five minutes. For students, we have a single-sign-on Portal that provides them with the ability to access a variety of systems including their college-provided email and Canvas.

During the creation of our enrollment CSV file, we consider any SFRSTCA.SFRSTCA_RSTS_CODE enrollment status code in Banner that starts with an "R" to be an active enrollment. Anything else is considered to be either (a) a deleted enrollment in Canvas if it is before the start of a course's part-of-term because the course has not started and they have not generated any activity in the course or (b) an inactive enrollment in Canvas if it is after the start of a course's part-of-term because the course has already started and the student may have generated activity in the course.

We currently have a student that is technically enrolled in a course but they are going through our disciplinary process and they are not allowed on our physical campus or in Canvas. They are allowed to continue to have access to our Portal, their college-provided email, and other systems. We are not able to withdraw or drop the student from their course(s) unless they have been officially suspended.  So that we are able to keep lines of communication open, we are not able to disable their Portal account or college-provided email.

Based on that background, how can we temporarily (and in an as automated manner of a way as possible) override their Banner enrollment status (which says that they should be in a course) until the disciplinary process has concluded?

Right now, I have been manually uploading an enrollment CSV file shortly after the scheduled data transfer has finished. The enrollment CSV file contains entries for only this student and they have the student's Canvas enrollment status set to inactive instead of active.

It seems that the only automated way to handle this is to track a specific enrollment status code in Banner (possibly create a new one) so that they are technically still active in the course according to Banner and other systems but Canvas would know it as an inactive enrollment. Our concern is that we do not know what impact this will have anywhere else in Banner, other systems, or in our data governance, reporting or analytics.

Thank you for your time and help.

** If only Canvas enrollment changes made through the graphical user interface would be considered "sticky" but they are not because I have read How do I format CSV text files for uploading SIS data into a Canvas account?, contacted Canvas Support, asked our Customer Success Manager, and I have also tried to see what would happen (it reverts). **

[Maeve_McCooey]

According to the SIS documentation enrollment dates are sticky. Could you populate these with historic dates through the GUI and then override/delete them when required?

[dbrace]

Hello  @Maeve_McCooey ,

Thank you for your reply.

Yes, enrollment dates are sticky.  Here is a process that I have put together based on how I understand what you said.

1. create a new section in the course shell (the regular section cannot have its dates changed because other students would still need to be able to access the course shell)
2. assign an end date to that section that is in the past
3. make sure that the "People" tab is not visible to students in the course
   1. other students would be able to see where the one student is enrolled and see that it is different
   2. this could be a privacy concern depending on how the section is named
4. enroll the one student into the new section with an active status
   1. the enrollment status probably would not matter because the section is completed
   2. automated data transfers would continue to enroll the one student into the regular section with an active status
   3. since the regular section has dates that are current, the one student's enrollment (when pulling up their Canvas user account page) will be labeled as "Active"
   4. since the new section has a date in the past, the one student student's enrollment (when pulling up their Canvas user account page) will be labeled as "Completed"
5. after the disciplinary process has finished and their enrollment status is accurate based on the results, remove the student's enrollment in the new section and delete the section

Am I understanding your comment and recommendation or have I gone in the wrong direction?

Not including #5, I have tested this in our "test" environment.  The student has two enrollments in the same course shell, one that is "Active" (the regular section) and one that is "Completed" (the new section).  As an admin, I used the "Act as" feature to masquerade as that student and they were able to get into the course shell.

I did try three enrollment statuses (active, inactive, concluded) and there was no difference in the student's actual experience or ability to get into the course shell, although there were differences when pulling up their Canvas user account page.

If I have understood your comment and recommendation, this does not work because the "Active" enrollment in the regular section has not-completed and is overriding the enrollment in the new section that has completed.

If I have misunderstood your comment and recommendation, or done something wrong in the process that I have outlined, can you clarify it for me or provide me with steps to fix what I have done.

Again, thank you for your time and help.

 @dbrace ‌

[Maeve_McCooey · Accepted solution]

Apologies dbruce, I did not realise there was no way to override the enrollment dates directly through the GUI. One suggestion that you've probably considered, and without knowing the full set-up your institution, is to:

1. Override their details (sticky fields) in their user account so they do not connect with your authentication provider. This would mean that they could not login to their actual Canvas account or access anything they are enrolled in.
2. Provide a second account with a unique User ID and a separate password, utilising the Canvas login https://example.instructure.com/login/canvas if you do not use this already

There are obviously some limitations to this with this:

- Any stored logins will still work e.g. apps and browser sessions that may not have closed.
- The student will not be able to access the app using the temporary account.
- SIS Feeds will still populate and staff and students with relevant access will still be able to view the student details. Therefore the overridden details would need to be appropriate for use e.g. unavailable student.
- The student will have to login via a different login page e.g. https://example.instructure.com/login/canvas and passwords need to be managed by the Canvas admin.
- The details will need to be overridden manually when the disciplinary process has been completed.

Apologies again, that is really confusing about the GUI enrollment date overrides, why call them out as sticky fields if they cannot be amended through the GUI?

Thanks,
 @Maeve_McCooey ‌

[dbrace]

Thank you for getting back to me  @Maeve_McCooey ‌.

Enrollment dates themselves are "sticky" in the GUI but the problems are that (1) other students still need to be able to get into the course shell so that is why I created an additional section and enrolled this particular student into it and (b) because the same student was enrolled in two different sections in the same course shell (one section through regularly scheduled data transfers and another section for this and those two sections have different dates, one that allows the student in and another that does not.

We do use single-sign-on from our portal and that means that we do populate their Canvas user account with a login ID from our data transfer.  I do see that according to SIS/CSV documentation that Canvas login IDs are a "sticky" field.  Using my admin user account (which is different from my regular user account which uses SSO authentication) from the GUI I changed my regular user account's login ID to include additional text.

My regular user account was then not able to log into Canvas from our Portal.  That is what I expected and good.

I then manually imported a users.csv file with only my correct user information in the file.  I did not use the "Override UI changes or "Clear UI-changed state" options while importing the CSV file.  I then checked the user account again and was not able to log into Canvas.  That is what I expected and good.

I think your recommendation (manually changing the login ID from the GUI and effectively temporarily deactivating their user account until it is manually changed back) is a viable option for this specific situation because the student is not allowed to enter any of the Canvas course shells but for another situation it might not work if the student is still allowed to go into some, but not all, course shells.

Thank you for your help,  @Maeve_McCooey ‌.

P.S. One additional thing to know about.  If someone has already logged into a Canvas mobile app, they will continue to be able to use it because of the saved credentials.  I do not know how long it would take for the credentials to be required again.

[Maeve_McCooey]

Great, I redeemed myself hopefully! Joking aside it's great to work through these issues because they may present for us all at some stage. I think the query about how long an app login lasts is one for support or the community. The guidance around removing access tokens advise For assistance with deleting access tokens for other users, contact your Customer Success Manager.

[dbrace]

 @Maeve_McCooey ‌, it can be fun working through these situation because they can help us with our situation.  They can also be frustrating because of all of the (potentially) unique details.

I still wish it would be possible for enrollments to be "sticky".  Maybe I will create an idea in the Canvas Community.

As far as tokens are concerned, I forgot that is how the mobile apps authenticated.  I thought it used to be possible for an admin to "Act As User" and remove them on their behalf but that no longer seems to be possible and might be a recent change.  I will check with me CSM.

Thank you again,  @Maeve_McCooey ‌.