[People] Hide Inactive Enrollments on People Page

Student enrollments which have been set to the "inactive" status currently show up on the People page tagged with the "inactive" label. We are now using the inactive status for students who have enrolled in a course, then dropped it after the start of the term. In large enrollment courses, these inactive enrollments will begin to clutter the People page when there are many of them. Please provide a method for hiding inactive enrollments on the People page, perhaps similar to the way they are hidden by default in the Gradebook (and can be shown by selecting "Show Inactive Enrollments").

55 Comments
cms_hickss
Community Contributor

This still appears to be an issue and it seems to be getting worse. Especially since INACTIVE is a status for a student's ability to access the course and its content and is often sent by API/CSV enrollment from a school's SIS. A teacher may not be informed of a withdrawal as quickly as the SIS sends the information to update the status.

That Canvas handles INACTIVE students differently across tools is not good. In some the INACTIVE student can be hidden (gradebook); in others, no one knows that Jane Doe is no longer in the class because she appears in the lists (people, moderate quiz, module progress) the same as a normal student.

If an INACTIVE student is not supposed to take a quiz, have time added to a quiz (moderate page) post to a discussion, read through a module, send email to other course students then the INACTIVE student should not appear in those tools unless the student is clearly marked as INACTIVE.

fosterl
Community Contributor

Here's another 'inactive' issue feature request: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/9957-retain-activeinactive-status-when-set-in-the-gui 

We'll get this feature right yet!  @Tasha_Biesinger  cms_hickss

rmf5
Community Novice

Hello All:

I have yet to see a clear, simple line by line list of how to ELIMINATE inactive students from people.  I have dozens of drops and adds per course and HAVE to find a way to delete people who will NOT ATTEND the course. Why can't I DELETE "inactive" students who ARE NOT ENROLLED anymore?!!

fosterl
Community Contributor

I'm with you, Robert. I know the faculty here would love to be able to HIDE inactive students. They need to be able to see them when wanted, but they definitely don't want their People page (roster) cluttered up with them all the time.

slbergh
Community Participant

The "inactive" labeling is inconsistent at best. I have a number of students who initially enrolled in a course for an upcoming semester, then dropped it as they were working out their schedules. Some of these appear as inactive, some do not. In my experience, when something happens inconsistently like that, it's more of a bug than a "feature".

fosterl
Community Contributor

Isn't this dependent on how your institution sets the "inactive" status? At OSU, anyone who drops a course on or after the first day of the term will appear as "inactive" as soon as the drop is processed. Anyone who drops before the term starts is set to "deleted".

slbergh
Community Participant

In theory at ISU people set to inactive drop off after 24 hours. In some cases this has proven true. I have a number of students, however, who dropped either in December or last week before the courses began, who are still listed in my rosters, while others who dropped the same day as them have disappeared from my lists.

chriscas
Community Coach
Community Coach

That definitely sounds like more of a local issue between the SIS and Canvas than solely a Canvas issue.  I don't think we've ever seen a case where Canvas ignored any status changes sent by our SIS integration in our almost 5 years of using Canvas here.  Whoever handles your SIS to Canvas syncing may need to look at how they are compiling data to sync, as that's been the issue here every time the enrollments in Canvas weren't correct.

rmf5
Community Novice

Hello All:

I don't know what kind of focus group testing preceded this decision. If one were to poll 100 actual users of Canvas I suspect few would want their list of people in a course cluttered with no longer enrolled students.

Bear in mind that this so-called improvement just showed up without any option to retain the status quo where I get to see only currently enrolled students.

What was wrong with that default?

mah52
Community Novice

I'll bet back centuries when formal education first began teachers and professors were able to "cross out" out on a list students who are not, or no longer, enrolled in the course...with quill pens.  Fast forward to this superior technology, and we cannot.  As the poster above said, I bet this decision was field tested by no one who would be an end-user. This clutters the end product rather than making life easier.