[People] Differentiate between SIS Import and Manual enrollments in People

As outlined in the Canvas Guides (https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-remove-an-enrollment-from-a-course/ta-p...), "If an enrollment is created via SIS, only admins can remove an enrollment from the course." This can create confusion for instructors in courses with both manual and SIS-created enrollments, where instructors have different abilities to manage a student's enrollment based on how it was created.

Because Canvas maintains an internal logic of whether an enrollment was created manually or via SIS import, this could also be represented to users in the People tool (using an icon or similar flag), to help instructors understand why particular enrollments can be managed in different ways.

11 Comments
Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
Status changed to: Open
 
cw2481
Community Participant

We would love this feature.  This is something we've raised with our CSM periodically throughout the years.  We have had to do massive workarounds to have this in place.  We created duplicate Student and Teacher roles called Non-Registered Student and Non-Registered Teacher to identify manually added enrollments.  Unfortunately there is no way to prevent teachers from being able to add any specific roles so we cannot force them to only add the Non-Registered roles.  We've had to implement a Javascript customization to every screen where a teacher or admin can add a user.  This customization hides the roles we do not want teachers to be able to add.  Unfortunately this customization breaks almost every time Instructure rolls out undocumented changes.  Our courses started Tuesday 9/8 and our customization broke Thursday 9/10.  Now our dev's are scrambling to fix it.  This change would remove the need for this workaround and make our lives much easier.

Sandie
Community Participant

It would be handy if there is a filter in People as well so we can clearly see who were manually enrolled and who were imported. I dont see anywhere in people telling us how the people was enrolled. If a teacher manually enrolled a group of students into their courses we will not know until someone raise an issue. We will need to go round to look into our MIS record to see who should be enrolled in the course.

Sandie
Community Participant

Still not see any changes in "People" page. One good change is that the separation of permissions to restrict lecturers add students or other roles in their courses. However, it will be good if able to filter out types of enrolment, different roles and sections in people page. All this are features in Moodle. In Moodle you can even edit when will the manually enrolment end so you wont need to worry about forgot to remove someone who just need temporarily access to a course.

abbyrosensweig
Community Participant

It would also be helpful to have reporting or an info field that shows who added a student/user to a course when that person was added manually (as opposed to via SIS data). We can run a report that shows whether someone was added manually or via SIS, but no further information about WHO added the manually-enrolled user.

Sandie
Community Participant

Agree with you abbyrosensweig. At the moment we turn off all permissions to add any other roles except teachers so they can self enrol into a course but I am sure there are still some students had added manually that we do not know of before the changes. Which report do you run that shows you the enrolment types? Our students are added via SIS. But it will be handy if there are manual enrolment that we can use to add external people for a specific time frame for certain purposes.

patfm
Community Explorer

@abbyrosensweig 

We would love to find out what report you are running or even what to look for to distinguish an SIS added user vs. manually added user.  We are needing to delete TAs that were added via SIS but don't want to delete manually added TAs.

Thanks!!

abbyrosensweig
Community Participant

Hi @patfm  , we get that info from the Provisioning report. In the subaccount where the course(s) for which you want info live, go to Settings > Reports, select the term and Enrollments, then run. In the report (at least in our instance of Canvas), we have a field called "created_by_sis" and TRUE means the enrollment came from SIS and FALSE means the person was manually added to the course. Hope that helps!

patfm
Community Explorer

Thanks so much!

This was exactly what we needed.

 

Pat

s_j_beale
Community Participant

We would very much welcome this.