Can we restrict a student from deleting their school email address from their profile in canvas

[lbethany]

We would like  to restrict students to use only their official student email account when they are in canvas and our classes.  Is there a way to keep them from adding a new email account and / or making an alternative account their default account?  We want to be sure and protect their academic data and correspondence to an official validated student account.

Thanks,

Lea Ann Bethany

Belhaven University, Classroom Technologist.

[Chris_Hofer]

Good morning, @lbethany ...

If you are a Canvas administrator at your school, you can go to the account "Settings" page.  On the "Settings" tab of the "Settings" page, scroll down to the section on "Features".  There is a check-box option for "Users can delete their institution-assigned email address".  If you make any changes to this page, make sure to scroll down to the bottom of the page to "Update Settings".

How do I set details for an account? - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com) -- See the section on "View Features" about half-way down the page.

I hope this will be of some help to you.  Let Community members know if you have any other questions about this...thanks!

[lbethany]

I checked, and our account is set with that option turned off.  With that setting, can a student overwrite their school-provided email?

Thanks,

Lea Ann Bethany

Classroom Technologist

[lbethany]

It is more that they are creating another email address and giving it the "star" to make it their default address.  Can you restrict a student from entering a second email address completely other, and force them to use they school assigned address?

Thanks,

Lea Ann

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @lbethany,

I have some javascript that you can add to your theme that will prevent a user from changing their default email (though they can still add others, which is fine for us).  As always with custom javascript, use at your own risk, but I can say it's been working well for us for quite a few years now.

-Chris

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @lbethany ...

I spent a few minutes chatting with Canvas Support about this, and they were unable to find anything else that would prevent users from adding an additional e-mail address to their Canvas profile.  The tech support agent suggested that a Canvas administrator could possibly use a custom CSS file to hide the option to add any personal e-mail addresses to their user accounts.  I don't know what that code would look like, however.  You might try looking at the javascript that @chriscas offered in his reply.

[heather_monti]

Hello, our institution is exploring the idea of NOT allowing students to enter an alternative email in their profile so that they only use their institution's email.  There is concern about FERPA with certain material being emailed to a personal account. Has there been any update on this since the 2022 post, especially a javascript that somebody created?  Thanks!

[chriscas]

Hi @heather_monti,

I believe this css should remove the link to add an email for all users of the web version of Canvas (I have not tested whether emails can be managed from the app or whether this would apply there too).  As with any modification done through css/javascript, I'll mention it's not a 100% lockdown, users could figure how to bypass these modifications if they really wanted to.

a.add_email_link {
    display: none;
}

Hope this helps!

-Chris

[lbethany]

We didn't do anything custom. I believe they can still do this with the settings button, but we don't let them change what is default I don't think.....