User Maintenance Best Practices

[kristin_bayless]

We've been on Canvas since 2012, and this summer for the first time I'm hoping to initiate some user maintenance for staff and students who've left the district. While some of our schools have revolving door enrollment, a large number of these users are gone for good.

My hope is to get some feedback from other districts who have implemented user maintenance.  While Instructure seems fine with leaving the users on the account indefinitely, this doesn't seem sustainable.  I see there was a recent feature request for the addition of a user status, but it didn't obtain the needed votes. https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/2942

If you've implemented a user maintenance routine, is it for both staff and students?  Do you only select students after a certain age (e.g. 21)?   What reports do you run prior to ensure a user can be reinstated?  If you think maintenance is a bad idea, I'd like to hear your thoughts on this as well.

I'm not marking this as a question, because I'd like to hear from several districts if possible, instead of getting a quick solved reply.

Thanks for your help! 

Kristin, Vancouver Public Schools

[kona]

 @kristin_bayless ​, I'm not K12, but I thought I'd go ahead and provide information on how we manage inactive users. For documentation purposes we don't actually delete anyone from Canvas. What we do instead is change their email and login name so they can't access the system any longer, we can see that they are no longer active students/faculty, and we can easily able to still see previous work/information for the person (which for us is very important for accreditation purposes - at least in higher ed).

Ex: Email gets changed to "noreply-179XXX@richland.edu" - where the 179XXX is actually their student ID number (and SIS ID for Canvas). Their login gets changed to rcc_179XXX - where the 179XXX is the student ID number.  None of these email addresses or login names are even close to what they originally were so it's easy to tell that a student/faculty member is no longer active in our system.

Hope this helps!

[kristin_bayless]

Kona,

Thanks for your feedback!  I was wondering if higher ed kept the outdated accounts in the system.  I can imagine, esp. with larger institutions, that after several years there could be tens or even hundreds of thousands of users no longer associated with the school who still had a user account, even one they could not access.

Kristin

[kona]

So far it hasn't gotten too bad, but we also aren't a HUGE University/College. Would definitely be interesting to hear about what others do for things like this!

[kristin_bayless]

Should I move this to a general discussion item outside of K-12?  I'm not sure how to do that!

[kona]

You should be able to share it. If not, let me know and I can.

[kristin_bayless]

Kona, I tried to share to the Canvas Admin group, but wouldn't allow for some reason.  Could you try?  Thanks

[kona]

That's strange that you weren't able to share it, but no worries, I went ahead and shared it with them!