Section access after cross list

[riosd]

Hello!

  We’ve created a tool to allow instructors to cross list courses, and some interesting behavior has been observed.  Immediately after the sections are cross-listed into the ‘master’ course, the instructor loses access to those added sections. 

  While acting as the instructor:

1)   In Settings -> Sections, the added sections appear in the list but are not selectable.  The section corresponding to the ‘master’ course is selectable (see screenshot ‘sections’). 

2)    In the People page, only the students in the section corresponding to the ‘master’ course are visible, although the instructor is enrolled in every section, as you would expect (see screenshot ‘people’). 

3)   The instructor is unable to create assignments or quizzes for any of the added sections, instead there is an error message displayed indicating that the added section id is unknown. 

  As an admin, I am able to access all sections within the course and see all enrollments from all sections in the people page.

 In production, this goes away after some time passes, and the instructor suddenly has access to all sections and can see enrollments in all sections, just as you would normally expect.  In test, this never happens, so I set out to determine why. 
After a few dead ends, I managed to fix the problem in test by running an enrollment import which essentially re-enrolled the instructor in all the sections with the ‘limit_privileges_to_course_section’ attribute set to ‘false’.  At this point, I thought I had it figured out, but there is a twist: I ran the enrollment import again, this time setting the attribute back to ‘true’, and it had no effect!  The instructor was still able to access all sections and see all people.  So, even though changing the attribute to ‘false’ fixed the problem, changing it back to ‘true’ did not re-create the problem.  This leads me to believe that there is an element to this that I don’t understand, so I am hesitant to apply this ‘fix’ to the tool.  

I’ve compared the details of the enrollments, course info, course settings, course permissions, and section info using the Live API and there aren’t any differences that seem relevant.  This is true for settings before and after the cross-list, and before and after the enrollment import.    

Does anyone have any insight into this situation that might help me understand what exactly is happening, and whether or not this does represent a viable solution? 

Thanks!

David Rios

Oregon State University

[chadscott]

We're having a similar issue in that when we decrosslist a teacher's course using our tool and then go back to recrosslist using the tool, the sections other than the original bucket course don't show up. The teachers are still teachers in the other sections, they show on their dashboards, but for some reason, in the tool, they don't show anymore. There are no errors being thrown in developer panel, and I've not changed the code, but it's just started happening this term.

[riosd]

It's very interesting to hear that this is new behavior, I didn't realize that before.  I'll have to start going back through the release notes to see if I can identify a change that may be relevant.  Thank you very much for your insight!

-David

[agschmid]

We've recently encountered this behavior also and filed a ticket. There seems to be some caching going on when the courses api is used along with the userID. After cross-listing/decross-listing, compare the following calls:

These fail to show the changes just made:

/api/v1/courses?as_user_id=sis_login_id:(loginID)&enrollment_type=teacher&per_page=100
/api/v1/courses?as_user_id=sis_login_id:(loginID)&enrollment_type=teacher&include[]=sections&per_page=100

These show the changes just made:

/api/v1/users/sis_login_id:(loginID)/enrollments?type=TeacherEnrollment&per_page=100
/api/v1/courses/sis_course_id:(sis_course_id)/sections

[riosd]

This definitely lines up with the behavior we are seeing, in that the teacher is the only one affected and the problem relates to their ability to see the new sections.  I hadn't thought to check the outcomes of different api calls like that, thank you for suggesting another way to look at the issue.  I opened a support ticket for this after posting my question, so I will give them this information as well.  Hopefully with the power of all our tickets combined, we'll be able to figure this out.

In your experience, does the problem mysteriously go away after some time passes?

Thanks!

-David

[agschmid]

Hi David,

Yes, it could be minutes, hours or sometimes days and all of a sudden the sections appear for the instructor.

[chadscott]

We are using the following calls to get the list of courses and after the decrosslisting event, the other courses do not show up.

Teacher crosslisting tool-

/api/v1/users/self/courses?inlcude[]=term&include[]=sections&per_page=75"

Admin crosslisting tool-

"/api/v1/users/"+ user +"/courses?include[]=term&per_page=75"

[riosd · Accepted solution]

Update:  One of the support agents I worked with on this problem was able to fix it for a user by clearing their cache on the support side.  Interestingly, I learned today that some other institutions are having a different problem (students seeing/accessing courses after their enrollment was removed) with the same exact solution!  The support rep on that case apparently fixed it by clearing the users cache, and this has led to a 'warmfix' being approved which will hit beta today or tomorrow, and presumably wind up in test and prod someday if it works.

I've notified the agent currently working on my case about this similarity, so hopefully this leads to a solution for both problems.

-David

[agschmid]

Thanks for the update! 

[riosd]

RESOLUTION: I was notified that a fix had been put in place on 10/14, and it looks like this issue has been fully resolved.  Our initial testing was successful, and since then we haven't had any reports of instructors losing access following a cross list.  Hopefully the similar problems experienced by other institutions have also been corrected by this.

Thanks all, and have a great day!

-David