Students are randomly being dropped from Courses

[JaredBruce]

A few times a semester we have students who will lose access to their course in Canvas.  When this happens they are completely dropped from the course, not just marked inactive. 

I've checked our SIS and the student is still active in it.  In the Import files that upload our students the students in question are marked active and our logs show no other integration changes that would set the students to inactive.  Any advice would be appreciated.

[sendres]

I'd use the Canvas API to fetch the course enrollments to see when they were dropped. If you've not used the API here's an easy workaround:

1. Visit the home page of a course at issue.
2. Get the course ID number at the end of the browser URL.
3. Open another new browser tab.
4. In the new tab, visit https://yourschool.instructure.com/api/v1/courses/course_id/enrollments?state[]=deleted&per_page=100, where yourschool is your Canvas domain and course_id is the ID number from step 2.

This will give you a JSON-formatted response with each dropped enrollment (or, at least, the first 100 of them). Look for the updated_at field for the UTC datetime of the deletion. This might give you a breadcrumb of when the deletions occurred.