Breaking Observer Link

0 Likes
(7)

There should be an easier way to delete an observer or break the link between an observer and a student other than a CSV upload.  There should be a way for admin through the people section to delete observers without having to upload a CSV.  

22 Comments
Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
Status changed to: Moderating
 
Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
Status changed to: Open
 
maarten_devos
Community Explorer

I agree on this. This takes to much time.

lacy_gilbertson
Community Novice

Agreed!  

Put a little "X" for the observers or admin to be able to remove students they no longer need to observe.  

We have staff who are academic coaches and they use the observing feature and their list of students could change every term. 

maarten_devos
Community Explorer

Good idea @lacy_gilbertson !

jackson_misty
Community Explorer

Absolutely agree....@lacy_gilbertson the idea of an X for the observer would be ideal but at the very least an easy way for the Admin to remove an observer from a student.

laura_clark
Community Explorer

Yes, please. Is there a reason an Observer should not have the ability to remove a pairing?

 

crhyland
Community Participant

I completely agree with this!!  Just this year we had a parent that was paired to the wrong student and was able to access the wrong students information. I had to contact support to help me get the student removed from the parents account.  We also have teachers using the observer feature for students on her caseload....but we can't get rid of students that leave.   This is the best way for support staff to observe their students or else that have a million courses on their dashboard when added to all the students courses as observers. Adding an 'X' beside the student you want to remove would be so helpful for everyone.

jackson_misty
Community Explorer

@crhyland - as a side-note, it sounds like you are having a similar issue that we were with our support staff and specialists.  We actually created an account level role called Specialist and then in our sub-accounts (we have 13 schools enrolled) we added the specialists to that admin Specialist Role.  This allows them to look at the specific students they need, not have to have dozens of classes listed and no pairing with individual students.

crhyland
Community Participant

@jackson_misty Yes, I have done that for our admin but didn't do that for our intervention/aides/SPED teams.  It is something that I have thought about though.  Just curious, what permissions did you set on that role??

jackson_misty
Community Explorer

@crhyland - I have only given them a few permissions.

  • Courses - View List
  • Analytics - View Pages
  • Conversation - send message to individual course members
  • Course Content - View
  • Grades - View All Grades
  • Users - View List

Feel free to email if you have questions - jackson_misty@4j.lane.edu.

 

ChristinaKarlin
Community Member

If a parent needs to be removed as an observer, there is currently not a way to remove them without running a CSV update. Removing the observer from the student's current courses does not unlink the observer. This means that previous and future associations would still exist and schedule changes will essentially pull that observer back in. Can we create a button under settings for admins to unlink an observer? 

stevenalvarez
Community Explorer

This is a great idea! I understand the suggestion from Canvas in the past is to remove the enrollments from the parent observer, although this does not seem to fully disassociate the parent observer from the student. It would definitely be nice to have the option (on the admin side) to be able to remove a student if needed. 

ChristinaKarlin
Community Member

Completely agree. We definitely have a need at the admin level for the ability to unlink an observer. There is currently no user friendly way to accomplish this. Removing the observer from the courses individually does not truly disassociate the observer.  

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

As outlined in the Canvas Deploy Notes (2021-03-17) observers will be able to remove observed students from their lists. Admins can use the Act As feature to accomplish this task without the need for an uploaded CSV.

jpayne2
Community Member

We have had several instances where we need to unlink an observer account from a student.  On the student account page, it would be helpful to have an area showing who the observers are and have the ability to unlink an account from a student from that page rather than going class by class. 

Thank you for your consideration.

Jenny Payne

robotcars
Community Champion

This is a great idea and needs to be available for everyone!

We hacked this in the Themes/JS, but I would definitely vote for it. We've had scenarios where a parent changes accounts, teachers observe students, and more. The API allows for correcting this, but it's not available in the UI. We modified the user profile page to show anyone who is observing a user or anyone the user is observing. With one click we can remove the association.

MattHanes
Community Champion

@robotcars , any chance you have that customization on github somewhere? I would love to add that to our account!

robotcars
Community Champion

@MattHanes,

I've added it to my CCSD extracted repo. I have plans to make our hole theme library available one day when things calm down (was my 2020 instructurecon hack night goal). The user observee/rs hack was written last year by a former team member who's in a different department, he stepped up to help us wrangle the sudden surge to 300k students and their parents, and this hack was super necessary to handle tickets and linking issues, or teachers who thought it would be a good idea to observe their students. The code is a bit redundant and could reduced to save some size, but time. I didn't do a README yet, but I tossed 2 example pictures in there. It was written to handle observer scenarios across multiple instances (shards/root_accounts) of Canvas, that shouldn't affect anyone without that situation, but please let me know if you have any issues.

Feel free to modify

https://github.com/robert-carroll/ccsd-canvas/tree/main/user-observees

MattHanes
Community Champion

@robotcars, thanks so much! That worked great! I just uploaded it to our Beta environment without any issues so I think I'm going to run this through our change control process to get it added into our production JS file.