Best Practices for User Management

[tlwitt]

I have hundreds of students and dozens of teachers who have graduated or are no longer employed by our school district.  I'd like to know how other districts handle this.  Do you suspend the user account or do you delete the account entirely?  When I suspend an account, it still appears in search results and there is no indication the account is suspended nor is their a function to filter out suspended accounts.  Is this not a function Instructure deems needed?

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @tlwitt,

I think there are a lot of little details that will end up playing into the responses and options around this.

I can say for my institution, we do not suspend, nor do we delete user accounts.  We do have a 7 year retention policy for courses though, so 7 years after the original end date for a course, we delete it.  We want users to be able to access courses even after they graduate, so removing or suspending the accounts wouldn't work well for that (and would create additional overhead of creating and maintaining a script to do that).

Another thing that could come into play is your specific Canvas contract.  I believe there are various pricing options to choose from, and one of them might be the number of active Canvas user accounts you have (but I do not know this for sure).  In that scenario, it would make more sense to minimize the number of active accounts.

The suspend feature itself in Canvas is still somewhat new, so maybe there will be more options at some point.  They may eventually add more features for filtering, especially if users submit ideas around that.  One other thought around this topic is that many schools/institutions that use a SSO provider will end up suspending access from that provider instead of doing it through each individual system (like Canvas), so the suspend feature is probably most popular with the subset of schools/institutions that use Canvas internal authentication and not an SSO, which might be rather low.

Hope this helps and gives you some things to think about

-Chris