Disable/Deactivate User at Account Level

(17)
This idea was previously submitted, but didn't get enough votes.  We need your help to make it happen this time around.

 

At my institution, if a student does not pay in time for a course, is unreachable by multiple forms of communication, and passes a given grace period, we temporarily conclude the enrollment in every active course the student’s Canvas account appears in.

 

 

Problems with this approach:

  • Students become confused/frustrated with Canvas because they think there is a Canvas error (they can see the course in the Courses tab but not on the dashboard)
  • If a student was in the course at the time of the concluded enrollment, the course "breaks (they assignments won't work, they can't submit assignments, etc.)
  • This is a huge time drain on our staff to conclude each course for multiple students.  Sometimes there are 10-15 courses depending on the major.
  • A professor cannot enter past grades for the student in the gradebook and has to keep track of their grades separately until their access is restored.  Our faculty is very frustrated with Canvas by this.
  • There is human error in forgetting to restore a course - student becomes frustrated.

 

As our programs (especially our online program) grows, we are very concerned that we will not be able to keep up with the workload.  This is inefficient at best and not a good practice.

 

Solution

We NEED a way to deactivate a user at the account level instead of manually removing them from each course.  This will save our staff time and will allow our professors to continue keeping track of their students grades.

43 Comments
beth_mossop
Community Novice

We definitely would like to see this functionality added.  While we manage our staff and students via authentication from our internal systems, we are looking to set up external users (mentors, observers, etc) directly in Canvas.  Before we do this, we need to consider how we can "expire" their access but still be able to restore it.  While it can be managed with a hack, this is not ideal and is a risky solution.  Further, when staff and students have left our institution, we not only want to cease their access but also make it clear to other users that they are no longer an active user in Canvas so they do not get added to courses unnecessarily.

rakshitha_rajan
Community Explorer

Absolutely, this helps me and my team a lot. We have had people leaving our university but we need to see all their contributions too. Smiley Happy 

lars_vemund_sol
Community Contributor
mmoore1
Community Contributor

We have a serious student rights issue where this could be beneficial to us for now. 

meichin
Community Participant

Our student business services just asked us to implement this.  I had no idea this couldn't be done through a SIS file. Is it true that each student has to be disabled in each course one-by-one?

beth_mossop
Community Novice

Afraid so- and unfortunately as long as the student account still remains, the student can be enrolled in new courses after you've disabled their previous enrolments (one-by-one)...we really need this feature to be implemented.

meichin
Community Participant

Thanks for the info - yikes.

estradak
Community Explorer

You have to be careful though - when our students are inactivated in our SIS, the file that "talks" with Canvas deletes them from our instance.

itsupport2
Community Member

 Activation has to be in user level with admin with status Active or Inactive user(student or faculty.  

Regards,

Ranjith

itsupport2
Community Member

 too support this idea in admin panel  there should be option disable users (make active and inactive). 

Regards,

Ranjith

tracy_martin
Community Novice

We really need this - not only a way to permanently block access, but also an easy way to temporarily block student access without losing any previous grades or submitted work. 

dtod
Community Contributor

An example for employees would be that we would like to prevent them from accessing the system if they are not up to date on their security training.

LeneW-P
Community Participant

I'd like to argue that this is just as important when there are faculty issues. The need to be able to disable an account at the admin level is crucial to managing access while also archiving records. 

cw2481
Community Participant

Adding here another voice arguing to develop this idea

joni
Community Explorer

I support this idea. Right now if a student leaves our school we are leaving their account active and just resetting the password just in case we want to reference their records. (We do save exported reports but it's nice to have the original Canvas account as a back up)

 

I would like to see a way to disable or make the account inactive account-wide so that they cannot log in and they are shown as inactive for all their courses (so teachers wouldn't see their name on the roster, but we could still access their grades and logs)

epulham
Community Contributor

Yes, please develop this idea! Also, where is the button to vote for a feature?? 

nicolopez77
Community Explorer

Disabling users is a basic feature of any systems. Fully agree this is needed in Canvas as well. How can we vote?

peremart
Community Explorer

Hi All. Has anyone developed this Idea so we can vote?
We are desperately looking for this since we migrated from Blackboard, where we had the option to temporarily disable a user account by just setting it Inactive. In fact, Blackboard has two options for this to be accomplished, "availability" and "row_status". By having "Available" or "Inactive" in any of the two fields we prevented access for disabled accounts.
We are migrating to Dual Auth and need options on active/inactive users, as the Dual Auth relies on applications controlling the access. The solution of changing the login name up is not feasible nor a standard across most applications in our institution.

eleanor_kippax
Community Member

Has anything more been done on this? (Can't quite believe its been going on since 2016!) We really need this feature for when a student pauses their studies or if there is an ongoing issue which means they should not be accessing Canvas. Having to deactivate them on individual courses is so time-consuming and there is so much room for human error if you forget a course.

jfountain
Community Participant

Needed!  We had this in Blackboard and need it in Canvas.  We have times when we need to restrict Canvas usage for disciplinary reasons, but not prevent their University login for other applications.  Disabling their SSO account is not an option.