[ARCHIVED] How can you differentiate an automatic enrollment from our SIS vs. a manual student enrollment in Canvas?

[samuel-vanhorne]

In the enrollment_dim table, I can't tell how to differentiate students who were automatically enrolled in Canvas course sites versus those who an instructor manually added. Is there a variable in the enrollment_fact or dim table (or elsewhere) that can help with this?

[auerbach]

In Canvas Data, enrollment_dim has a sis_source_id field, so if you populated that field for automatic enrollments, you could use that to differentiate. We look at sis_user_id in pseudonym_dim for a similar reason, but that's only to see if the user was created manually.

When looking at the response to an API call like https://yourschool.instructure.com/api/v1/users/91/enrollments, you might see a field named sis_upload_id. For us, we upload data every morning and that upload ID provides a reference to which upload process created the enrollment. I believe checking whether that field has a value would answer your question. That field is present in the API, but not in Canvas Data, however.

[smccann · Accepted solution]

Glen is correct, you would want to see if the sis_source_id column in the enrollment_dim is null, or filled in. Although in the documentation it mentions that the field is deprecated, I have seen that it is still being used and updated.

I would warn though that if an enrollment was added manually to a course and then later was placed in the SIS and updated via SIS, there will only be one record for that enrollment that would show the sis_source_id column filled. It will not have two records for the enrollment.