Hide Inactive students cluttering "People"?

[mahlersj]

I've tried to find a solution to this problem in the forum in the past, but nothing works for me.

I have all these students who've dropped my classes showing up in "people" as students still.  It's maddening since I use "people" to see how active my current enrollees are. 

Seems like there should be a simple setting to hide these inactive students.  But do not see one.

Help!

[rfry]

If they have dropped your class you can take them out of people and you will still be able to see them through prior enrollments.

1. click on the three dots all the way on the right side of your screen across from the student's name.

2. choose "user details"

3. under memberships it has an option to "conclude" the students enrollment. Once you click it their information will be archived and they won't show up under people anymore

You can always restore a student if they end up back in your class again or you choose the wrong student on accident!

I hope this helps! 😊

[ward_michael]

Our instructors do not have permissions to change Canvas enrollment statuses.  That would require we allow the instructors the "Users - add / remove students in courses" permission which we cannot as we want our Canvas SIS Imports to be managing the enrollments based on the official data from our SIS system.

Even if Instructure decoupled the permission to allow only changing the enrollment status to Concluded status that would still just cause more issues as instructors would mistakenly change student enrollment statuses.  However, Instructure should add a separate capability to allow instructors to restrict student access to their Canvas course in the cases for student disciplinary measures such as disruptive behavior affecting other students in the course or violating code of conduct as that is faster than waiting to have them contact Admissions to restrict the student.

The solution (Wish List for Instructure) should be some simple solutions as to the filtering of the display of the People roster based on the enrollment statuses.

Add three checkboxes for the filtering view on the People page.

[ X ] Include Active Enrollments    ...checkmarked/enabled by default

[    ] Include Inactive Enrollments    ...unchecked/disabled by default

[    ] Include Prior/Concluded Enrollments    ...unchecked/disabled by default  [I do not like the current Prior Enrollments placement as many new instructors do not see it]

That way the default People roster view will only show the Active enrollments at each visit to the People page.  Then if for some reason the instructor wants to see the other students with the other statuses then they can check or uncheck the relevant boxes.

It would also be nice if Instructure added a "Print Roster" button that the instructor could use the filtered view to print out what they want.   (only Active, only Inactive, mix of Active and Inactive, only Prior/Concluded, ...etc.).

[James]

@ward_michael 

Here's how we handle things. Like you, we do not let faculty control enrollments, that's all handled through the SIS.

Our SIS imports will delete an enrollment if the student drops before the census date (10th day of our semester) and complete (conclude) an enrollment if they student drops after the census date. We don't use the inactive state.

The Canvas Admin Guide lesson How do I format CSV text files for uploading SIS data into a Canvas account? makes this note for the status field

This is how you enroll, conclude, deactivate (make inactive), or remove an enrollment in a course. Mark as active to enroll a user in a course, completed to conclude a user's enrollment in a course, inactive to deactivate the user in the course, and deleted to remove a user from a course. When in an 'inactive' state, a student will be listed in the course roster for instructors but will not be able to view or participate in the course until the enrollment is activated.

Because we don't use inactive, but use concluded instead, the students no longer show up for us. The instructor can change that option, by going to the People > Settings option and selecting (or deselecting) the View Prior Enrollments option. That is not an option for the inactive status.

With our default course settings (we allow our instructors to override these), a student with a concluded enrollment can still see the course and the data is still available to the teacher for analytics (in case they need to show that the student wasn't doing anything and that's why they were dropped). For inactive students, you cannot get analytics for them. More information about the differences in the enrollment status options is available in the resource Canvas Enrollment Status Comparison.

Perhaps a review of the resource would help you decide if inactive or concluded is the better option? Schools use them different ways, but I get the sense that inactive is intended to be a temporary thing to get the student's attention: owe money, disciplinary actions, need to see your advisor. I can see it where you think they might come back after resolving an issue. Concluded gives you more flexibility and you can set the ability for them to access the course through options and may be more appropriate if you don't expect that they will return.

[ward_michael]

We use the Delete status before our semester starts but not after.  Then for Drops we use Inactive.  At the end of the course section end date after about 14 days we change all students to read-only Concluded (some instructors still allow student participation after end date but after 14 days only allow read-only).  Then after 30 days after course section end date we set to Inactive for all students (colleges do not want students or limit sharing of previous course info with next semester students).

One of the issues with Concluded status was that it prevents instructors from assigning grades.  Instructors are supposed to input and be done with grading before the end of those 14 days but there are some with extenuating circumstances (wish Instructure would allow grading on Concluded).  For those exceptions we have to set in our Ellucian Colleague SIS system the enrollments to Incomplete status so our SIS Import code can bybass setting the enrollment statuses.

Our colleges do not want the dropped students (even after Census) to have read-only access which Concluded status allows them so our only option is to use Inactive or Deleted statuses.  It was preferred to use Inactive instead of Deleted so the instructors can see the enrollment history and more immediately see when students drop their courses.  Also, any student disputes (such as claiming participation before instructor drops them) could be more easily reviewed while in Inactive state but if we use Deleted state we would need to develop an exception system for those individuals so our SIS Imports would not keep setting the enrollment status back to Deleted since it is not a Sticky field (been trying to propose we add new enrollment statuses in our Ellucian Colleague SIS system for student disputes as well as for students who violate the student code of conduct or honesty policy).

If there was just the filtering checkboxes for the People roster view this would not be an issue.  Seems like a reasonable, simple, intuitive request for Instructure.  I hope they consider this and I will be mentioning to our Instructure CSM as well.

[James]

@ward_michael 

Our colleges do not want the dropped students (even after Census) to have read-only access which Concluded status allows them so our only option is to use Inactive or Deleted statuses.

You can use the restrictions in the course settings and the concluded status to accomplish this.

We do something similar with our students who have not completed the online orientation to Canvas. We put them in them in a section of the course that does not open until the course is over. Then we make sure that the "Students can only participate in the course between these dates" and "Restrict students from viewing this course before start date" option is checked in the course settings and that "Students can only participate in the course between these dates" is selected for the special section with the restricted dates. This lets them know that they have an enrollment (it shows up under future enrollments) so they can tell they're in the course. We name the section of the course "need to complete orientation" so we know its purpose.

What you would want to do is flip that around. Make the dates on your special section end before the course begins and set the "Students can only participate in the course between these dates" for that section. Then under the course details, you would want to select "Students can only participate in the course between these dates" and "Restrict students from viewing this course after end date."

From the admin settings, you can enable the ability to restrict access (and even lock it). When you supply the dates via a SIS Import, it automatically checks the box to restrict access to those dates.

Your process is even simpler than mine. I keep track of all of the enrollments and when everyone has completed the orientation, I remove the orientation section from Canvas. In your case, once they're completed, they're completed, and you would want to leave them in the system, so that special section would stay. What happens during the transition is that I delete them from one section and add them to the other, the same that I would do if they switched sections that were combined in the same course. It doesn't lose their grades or submissions when I do this. The difference is that you would make the concluded in the special section so faculty can easily remove them from the gradebook and people page.

Test it in your beta instance, but I'm fairly confident I've described that process correctly (I wrote the code to do this a little over 8 years ago).