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 · Accepted solution]

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.

[dbrace]

Hi @JaredBruce,

Continuing with what @sendres referenced, I do similar things on a regular basic, I would recommend using the JSON Beautifier and Editor extension that is available (in the upper-right corner) for every Chrome-based web browser.

I use it with Microsoft Edge because that web browser provides more flexiblity for when an extension is and is not enabled. Information about that setting can be found in the "Change site access permissions for extensions in Microsoft Edge" support article at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/change-site-access-permissions-for-extensions-in-....

-Doug

[sendres]

@dbrace has a good suggestion. Firefox will also natively make the response readable with syntax highlighting and beautification.

[dbrace]

Yes, @sendres, Firefox natively does a good job of displaying the contents of an API or JSON request.

The extension that I recommended has the ability to display the data in a table (depending on how many layers there are from API or in the JSON file) and also has the ability to download the results as a JSON file that can be an archive and used in other locations (I use it in Excel with Power Query a lot).

-Doug

[JaredBruce]

I appreciate your help and @dbrace as well.  I ended up just using Postman to retrieve the results from the above API call and I found that this is occurring in our instance due to improper merging of records. 

[dbrace]

You are welcome, @JaredBruce!

-Doug

[james_whalley]

@JaredBruce You may want to also reach out to Canvas support directly, as they have insight into what's happening in your specific instance of Canvas.

[JaredBruce]

Thank you all, I'm going to look into these solutions tomorrow.  I appreciate the help so far!