Students Randomly Enrolled in Canvas Courses

[AlexaSears]

As a Canvas admin, I observed about 83 students randomly enrolled in courses in Canvas that they are not registered for in our SIS (Colleague) this fall. Normally, dropped or withdrawn students retain a record of previous enrollment, and students are never enrolled in credit-bearing courses manually in Canvas.

No clear patterns emerged—students vary in enrollment dates (as far back as spring), courses, years, and advisors. An LTI Access Token report showed no third-party LTI activity coinciding with these enrollments. No SIS imports occurred during those times. Canvas support confirmed Canvas does not automate enrollments; these are older than 30 days so there are no logs in Colleague to check against, with no errors in SIS syncs to explain the issue.

Has anyone ever had this happen?

[melodyc_lam]

@AlexaSears Welcome! I know you stated that students are never enrolled manually into courses in Canvas, but by any chance does the course(s) have a "Self Enroll link" enabled for them? If there is one, that may explain how students are enrolling into courses they shouldn't have been.

In addition, you'll want to confirm that these student's SIS IDs are mapping correctly between Colleague and Canvas. I'm not an expert in that particular SIS but if the IDs don't match that may explain why they're randomly enrolled.

[AlexaSears]

Hello,

Thank you for reaching out!

Self-enrollments are only enabled for manually created courses like sandboxes. Is Canvas mistakenly mixing SIS-created courses with sandboxes? We haven't seen students gaining unintended access to sandboxes.

I'll look into the SIS IDs with Colleague. Good thought!

[AlexaSears]

I've set the self-enrollments link to "Never" just to be safe, although I'm not convinced it's the cause.

Unfortunately, the SIS IDs do map correctly between Canvas and Colleague.

Back to the drawing board.

[oneilllj]

Hi @AlexaSears 

Could this be a carryover of the students registering for the course pre-commencement and dropping out before it started, with the pre-commencement enrolments being synced to Canvas?

Any enrolments synced like this will remain active unless you physically deactivate them from the course.

Just a thought.

Thanks

Jen

[JaredWall]

I have never seen an issue with random enrollments. My first thought would be to check on the ability of course roles to manually add users to a course. We do not allow anyone other than full account admins to add users to courses unless a specific role we created at the course level (enroller) is provided. These are never given for academic courses to ensure FERPA is adhered to. That would be my only guess. If it is truly something from an SIS import, then it would require checking the imports on the date of that student enrollment to see if they appear on the file that was sent to Canvas. This can be done from the SIS import log, filtering for that date, viewing the corresponding HTML and downloading the file from that record.

[AlexaSears · Accepted solution]

Hello everyone,

Thank you for your solutions!

What caused this was ILP Syncs that were requested to the IT department to spot fix access issues were also somehow randomly enrolling those students into classes. The root issue in Colleague still has not been resolved, but now that it was proven to not be a Canvas problem, I will close this topic.

Thank you!