[ARCHIVED] Unlink Student From Observer

[mbuonato]

Today I needed to unlink a student from an observer/parent. The joys of broken families. Despite removing all the enrollments from the observer account the student still showed in the parent under observing. I was able to import this code in a csv into the SIS to resolve this issue...

observer_id,student_id,status
smith@yahoo.com,student_9999,deleted

The observer id comes from the sis id (which was empty so I forced the email in)

The student id is the student data in the sis id

and the status must have deleted (the only other choice is active)

[KristinL · Accepted solution]

Hi Melissa -

Thank you for sharing!

Here are some related posts:

How does a parent stop observing a student?‌

Re: How do I remove an observer?‌

Of course, an email or call to the friendly pandas at Canvas Support can help admins out with this as well. API Calls are a little out of my comfort zone, so that's what I've done in the past. The .csv solutions seems a less scary. 

[KristinL · Accepted solution]

Hi Melissa -

Thank you for sharing!

Here are some related posts:

How does a parent stop observing a student?‌

Re: How do I remove an observer?‌

Of course, an email or call to the friendly pandas at Canvas Support can help admins out with this as well. API Calls are a little out of my comfort zone, so that's what I've done in the past. The .csv solutions seems a less scary. 

[Ganelon]

These links associated to the solution are broken. 

[KristinL · Accepted solution]

Hi @mbuonato and @Ganelon -- I have an update to share! Starting on March 17, you'll be able to remove observed students from your Observer account! You can read about the details in the Canvas Deploy Notes (2021-03-17). 🎉

[alexpearson60]

If you are using the SIS Import tool in Canvas this will work fine. But if you are creating the observer links using the API, an SIS import will have no effect. You have to unlink the observer in whatever code you are using to talk to the API. Canvas is funny that way. The API, the SIS Import tool, and the manual tools are viewed separately. For example, if you import enrollments or create enrollments from the API, the teachers cannot unenroll students. Similary, the stuff you do in the API cannot be undone through the SIS Import Tool. Would love to have a Canvas engineer weigh in on this to confirm.