Student Name not updating

[JackThor]

We are a school that uses colleague and upload users from colleague to Canvas. We have this one student with a name that does not match anything we have in our system. We checked their name, nickname and chosen and none of those matches the student's name in Canvas. I checked the csv file that contains user name that we upload into canvas and see that the data matches what we have in colleague and yet the manual SIS import is not updating the students name. I though that maybe the student updated their name themselves but when I acted as the student there wasn't an option for the student to update their name. We then notice that the student has 2 login, there is ours and one from a different college.

Is it possible the student's name we are seeing is from the other login? 

Has anyone encounter issues with a student having multiple login from multiple institution or their data not being sync correctly with your institutions even though the correct data being fed into the SIS import is correct?

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi @JackThor 

While it is possible to have multiple login_ids associated with a user, there is only one first_name, last_name, full_name, sortable_name, or short_name for a user.

It is possible that at some point the user's name go manually edited, which would prevent an SIS feed file from updating it.  However, you can get around that by checking the "Override UI changes" checkbox when manually uploading the feed file with the user's information.

The other alternative is that, if both of the login_ids associated with the user have SIS_ids (meaning, they can be updated via an SIS user feed), then there could be two records for the user included in your SIS user feed.  If that is the case, then the name associated with the last record for the user in the SIS feed is the one that is left when the feed is done.

[JackThor]

For the alternative did you mean that if the other school is updating the student's information and we are as well, who ever did it last is what canvas use?

[mzimmerman]

If there are multiple user feeds being uploaded via SIS import, and the user is in both feeds, then Canvas will have the name from the last feed saved.

What I have found is more common is that, depending on where the user feed information is coming from, the user may be in the "upstream" system (Colleague?) more than once with different information, so they appear in the user feed file twice.  Since the entries in the feed file are processed in order, the "last" entry in the feed file is the one that you see.

On the other hand, even if the student can't edit their name, it is possible that an admin from either your school or the other school may have manually entered/updated the student's name in the system.  That would override the name setting from the SIS import unless you check the "Override UI Changes" option when uploading the SIS import.

[JackThor]

I have confirmed that on our side the user only appear once on the feed. The override UI Change worked perfectly. Thank you.