Inactive enrollment status for withdrawn students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

[chriscas]

I'm seeing this behavior too, and filed a bug report with Instructure to see what they say.

I think the change they were trying to make was to have the submissions for inactive students download when the faculty clicked the "download submissions" button from gradebook.  If having them show up in speedgrader is a side effect of this change, I'd definitely vote to put it back the way things used to be.

For financial aid purposes, we are planning to use the inactive status for any students who drop or withdraw after the first day of the semester.  This was going to work quite well before this weekend, since faculty would still be able to see activity and grades, but functionality like speedgrader didn't show the inactive students at all.  Now faculty are going to see a ton of students who haven't been in the course for possibly months.

Additionally, I think there should be an option in gradebook to hide the inactive students (or perhaps tie that to the "show concluded enrollments", which right now actually does the opposite for inactive).  We'd like the inactive data to be available to faculty for reporting purposes, but also let thembe able to hide the inactive students in their regular day-to-day course work.

[Renee_Carney]

Jared, Melissa, and Christopher.

Thank you for the information.  I saw the comments earlier this morning and have been looking into it.  I'll have an update later this afternoon.

[susan_cornish]

On a related issue-

We have been very happy to have an inactive status introduced, and like many others we use it for students who withdraw after some activity in the course. We need to report withdrawals and we need access to any activity they completed.

However, the withdrawn students ("inactive" in Canvas) still appear in the  list of enrolments rather than prior enrolments, even after the course is concluded. This limits our abiity to interface effectively with our enrolment system.

Maybe we still need a 'withdrawn' category.

[Renee_Carney]

Thank you to everyone who commented and made suggestions around inactive students appearing in the SpeedGrader.  This was a purposeful design based user requests.  However, we also recognize the need to be able to exclude inactive students in the SpeedGrader.  We are exploring a solution that would force the SpeedGrader to respect the show/hide setting in the Gradebook.  We’ll post here when an update or release is available.

[awilliams]

If there is a silver lining to the Speedgrader/Inactive issue which appeared as of the April 2 production release, it is that it helped us uncover another bug with inactives. As it turns out, if you leave an assignment submission comment on an inactive student, that generates a notification to the inactive student. I'm sure you can imagine the confusion this causes the student.

If there is a black lining around that silver lining it is that this also means that my advice to faculty about the Speedgrader/Inactive issue to "just treat all no submissions the same and don't worry if they are inactive or not" is not very good advice. I would advise admins to warn their faculty about this issue before inactive students get a bunch of comment notifications from courses they aren't enrolled in.

For reference, my case number for this issue is 01306004.

[jared_flaherty]

"if you leave an assignment submission comment on an inactive student, that generates a notification to the inactive student"

i can stop scratching my head meow...   thank you!

[millerjm]

Hi Renee, what is the timeline on this fix? 

I am literally putting in a request for a PeopleSoft coding change for our extract, and I'd like to be able to roll the change from "completed" to "inactive" into that request, but I do need to know if the speedgrader/inactive and notifications related to it will be fixed soon in order to modify my request if needed prior to work starting. 

Thank you!

[Renee_Carney]

We do not have a firm ETA yet, but the goal is within the next 2 releases.

[millerjm]

Thanks! 

[Renee_Carney]

is on beta. 

Find more information in the Canvas Beta Release Notes (2016-04-11)