Inactive enrollment status for withdrawn students

[millerjm]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

We are a new Canvas customer and still in the implementation phase.  We are struggling to find a system that would allow us to completely remove the ability for a student to access a site but allow the instructors to view the activity.

Due to Federal financial aid policies, our financial aid office needs the last date of attendance for students who withdrew themselves from classes in 2013-2014.  This has put a huge burden on our faculty and our elearning department, who must research this last date of attendance on behalf of the faculty because the students are no longer enrolled in the class in the LMS. We need to be able to empower our faculty and academic deans to be able to go into the courses and be able to easily figure out what a student did during the semester, what grades were earned, and any communication that occurred during the course.  These issues are not unique to our institution – because it is a federal financial aid issue, it probably affects most higher-ed institutions in the US.  We have spoken to a number of other institutions using Canvas and so far everyone has had the same dilemma.

Currently, there are the following enrollment statuses documented and easily available in Canvas, according to the SIS API documentation:

1. Active
2. Deleted
3. Completed

There was a related posting in the old community from January 29, 2015 from Scott Finkeldei:

In the full API documentation available at:  https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/all_resources.html , There seems to be a few other states that can be chosen for an enrollment.  I cannot find any other information about the “inactive” status. When I used SIS import to change an enrolled student to “inactive,” it was successful and changed the state to "inactive."  However, the user disappears from the roster and gradebook in the course.

I did some testing, and this is what happened with the Completed and Inactive states:

Completed:  Student still had access to some parts of the course, and could post new discussion messages.  The student could see assignments and submissions.  It also logged activity when accessing the course with the “completed” status.  The instructor was able to see the student’s activity accurately under “View Prior Enrollments.”  I attempted to create a new section with a past date on it and checking the boxes to not allow access.  This removed the ability for the student to access the course but the activity reports did not appear correctly because technically the course was only running for one day.

The completed students also show in the Gradebook if “show Concluded enrollments” is chosen. 

Inactive:  Student had no access to anything in the course, as desired.  The student did not appear under “View Prior Enrollments” but the activity did show up in the admin screen under the user details for Page Views.

We would like to limit ALL access to the course for the “inactive” student like seems to be happening now, but leave this activity and gradebook data in the course for the instructor to see. This would greatly simplify the process of obtaining the Last Date of Attendance.

  Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2016-01-09)

People

Inactive Enrollment Type

[bdoran]

chriscas, I hope you saw this update.. but just in case it looks like your feedback was heard and implemented just in time for Spring start!!

[dspiel]

Lots of comments to read through so hopefully I'm not repeating a previous comment, but would be awesome if there was setting that on x day into the quarter it would detect activity and automatically mark the student as concluded.....

[chriscas]

I think that's probably something that will be done on the school/institution side before sending the SIS data to Canvas.  We are having discussions internally here about how we want to handle the new inactive status with our students who drop.  It's all going to be built into our code that generates the SIS data to send to Canvas.  I'm pretty sure Instructure is going to want to have a hands-off approach to the SIS data, since it's so variable by school/institution, and needs to be 100% accurate based off the SIS.  I could see a setting like this somehow getting changed or getting set incorrectly and generating tons of calls to both Instructure and the school/institution form students.  I actually think the system is setup pretty good as-is, where we tell Canvas exactly what status each student enrollment is at with each SIS upload.

[hvaughn]

Hi  @scottdennis ​

We are well into the spring term here, so I was able to check the course access ability of several students who have been withdrawn from classes. From my tests (masquerading as these students), the students who have been withdrawn can no longer access those courses. These students do appear in the Prior Enrollments section of the courses, but can no longer access the courses as they have been able to do in previous semesters.  It appears that the concluded enrollment is an inactive enrollment - meaning no access. 

As a result, this really has been an awesome update! Thank you!

[scottdennis]

Awesome Holly.  Thank you for coming back and answering this open question.

[millerjm]

Hi All,

I'm noticing that there is some differences in terminology that is already confusing staff in my office...and if you see the last screenshot for some reason the term name goes away from the user's enrollment list when a user is inactive in the course. 

If an active student in the class is marked as "concluded" by clicking on "Conclude this enrollment"

there are several different ways that this can be referred to:

• The SIS csv file must say "completed" as the status (not concluded)
• Prior Enrollments page has them listed and on the page for the user, it says "Conclude" or "Reinstate" this user
• The Users page with the course list says "Inactive" (which is the most confusing part since there is now an inactive state"

Now the actual issue that I noticed with an inactive enrollment is that the term seems to go away in the user's list of enrollments:

If I need to open up a ticket or a feature idea, please let me know.

[cms_hickss]

This is good to know. I would mark this helpful if there was an option to do so.

[millerjm]

I'm going to open a new discussion related to these issues since this feature idea is getting kind of long, but this way it's linked for product team to see.  Enrollment State Confusion (Completed, Concluded, Inactive, Prior Enrollments)

[jared_flaherty]

FYI, this last weekend's release to production made some changes to the Inactive Student status functionality.       Canvas code was updated to allow for Inactive Students to be able to Download Submissions....   and something came along with it....

Inactive Students are now displaying in the Speedgrader and Instructors can assign grades, etc.    There is no difference in functionality in the speedgrader between an active and inactive Student enrollment.       

[mdthomas]

 @jared_flaherty  - this is good to know.  Thank you for sharing.  We will be testing the affects of this in our systems.  What was the rationale behind allowing inactive (in our case, withdrawn students) the ability to download submissions?

- Melissa