How to remove student ability to see other students enrollments?

[coonce_am]

One of my HelpDesk team if it was possible to remove the ability for students to see other student's enrollments in Canvas. 

[a_craik · Accepted solution]

Hi Aaron

Hiding 'People' from the course navigation items would do the job.

If you wanted students to be able to see the People tool but not be able to click on a classmate and see what else they are enrolled on; for that you'd need some custom coding - a shout out to the canvas developers group would be a good start for that!

[JACOBSEN_C]

So, wait.  Hiding "People" in the course navigation column also removes a courses students as options to send messages to for their classmates?  Just to confirm...

[a_craik]

Hi Clint

Hiding "People" won't do that I'm afraid, but if  @coonce_am ‌'s goal is to "to remove the ability for students to see other student's enrollments in Canvas" then doing this would prevent a student from being able to click on a classmate and easily see all the other courses they're also enrolled on

[joe_greene]

Why is that the only way to keep enrollment information secret, and how do we do both that and use the People tab to organize student Groups within a course? 

This borders on a FERPA violation and you're saying it's built into Canvas on purpose?

[chriscas]

Hi @joe_greene,

This can also be adjusted in the the permissions area of Canvas (the "Users - view list" permission specifically), but that too appears to take away group options.  As for why that's the case, I can only speculate that since groups can reveal roster information as well, it was decided that all of that sort of thing needed to be controlled in one area.

On the FERPA front...  From what I know, viewing a class roster is fine under FERPA as long as you're not having multiple course sections combined together in Canvas but not officially crosslisted in your SIS.  Even in that scenario, is seems most institutions generally accept combining multiple sections of the same course, but may draw the line at HIST-101 and MATH-352 being combined together, for example.  Also in a similar vein, courses that use discussions will almost always basically reveal course rosters because students will see the names of everyone who makes a post.

-Chris

[joe_greene]

Our university official in charge of those decisions says it's a FERPA issue according to the wording we use and the latest FERPA guidelines. This will limit some of our usage of the Groups feature as we do use the self signup option for several courses.

[nwilson7]

@joe_greene Out of pure curiosity, are you an online only institution?  Do you use discussions in your courses, as those are also going to list student names unless you do anonymously only.  I am genuinely intrigued by this.

-Nick

[joe_greene]

We're not online only. Seeing student names isn't the issue, the issue is seeing enrollments for other courses in that space. There's no discernible reason why the enrollments are visible there as they're not relevant to the course being taught.

Two of our programs do have everyone taking the same courses at the same time, but two of them don't and the two that don't also don't have the various sections of each course cross-listed.  Students might not share more than a single class with any of their classmates in those programs. Again, there's no good reason why the enrollment status of other classmates is shared on the People tab, and even less for why it can't be removed/hidden without losing all the other options in the People tab.

[nwilson7]

@joe_greene I believe your CSM can provide you with a script to remove it.  It has been a few years but if I remember correctly our CSM said that is one of the few scripts they do offer (since in general they don't support that sort of customization).

It should only be showing enrollments that you have in common with those students, at least that is how it has worked when I have tested it.  That is why I asked about you being online only as knowing which students you have the same classes with (and I do mean exact same, not just the same topic but a different section) is something you would learn by looking around the classroom.  I honestly have no idea why it is even there though other than to maybe help build relationships and to know "hey, you are also in my X class, want to study together?" or something. 

Good luck with everything!

-Nick 

[nwilson7]

@joe_greene I thought I would add to what else has been said as I did some investigating on this several years ago.  The "Enrollments" that you see as a student are just enrollments that you have in common with those students (assuming that is what you are referring to). Every institution I have been involved in considers this "Directory Information" as you would see this information by looking around the class in a face-to-face version of a course.  So, generally it is not a FERPA issue and the information is not as vast as it may seem.

-Nick

[joe_greene]

I just spoke with our university official who makes these decisions and she's calling it a FERPA issue that needs to be resolved. Our university default is student enrollment information is confidential unless the student chooses to reveal it, and less than 10% of our students make that choice. 

[kblack]

Just to add to what  @a_craik ‌ has said, I did a bit of searching in the Community because I remember this topic has come up before.  While hiding People will work in a course site, one must remember that students might also (being the clever folks that they can be) see people's names via the Canvas Inbox while composing a message in one of their classes or within student groups, should they be in them.  Indeed, the Canvas Developers‌ is a place to check as Adam stated, and here are a few links to somewhat similar discussions in the past, neither of which were resolved:

Can you hide student names in the Inbox? 

Hide 'people' in groups? 

[elarin]

We had the same dilemma for our instance. We didn't choose to remove the "People" link because we do allow students to see a list of other students in their class. So what we did was add code to our global javascript file to remove the "Enrollments" section from a user's profile UI.

[a_craik]

Any chance you could share that code snippet, Erick?

[elarin]

Sure. Here's the code (make sure to scroll to the right to get all of the code):

// Hide enrollments in the user profile page for all non-admins
 if (window.location.pathname.match(/^\/courses\/\d+\/users\/\d+/) && ENV.current_user_roles.indexOf('root_admin') < 0) {
 $('.profileEnrollment__Items').parent().parent().remove();
 }

[dspiel]

This code seems to possibly target Canvas in all. Can it be targeted for a particular course or a particular student? The reason I ask is we had one student in particular who had been confrontational so we looked into limiting the ability to use the inbox at all & at the moment my main interest is we have certain programs that want to use Canvas as a means to reach out to students and give information, but due to FERPA students aren't supposed to know who is enrolled and who isn't.  any thoughts?

[elarin]

If you know the course ID (ex. 1234), then you could do this to target that course for all users:

// Hide enrollments in the user profile page for all non-admins
 if (window.location.pathname.match(/^\/courses\/1234\/users\/\d+/) && ENV.current_user_roles.indexOf('root_admin') < 0) {
 $('.profileEnrollment__Items').parent().parent().remove();
 }

[KeriSalyards]

@dspiel If it's just a single student occurrence, have you considered making a different role for that student? You can turn off those permissions, then, and still allow them to academically participate in the class.