Incorrectly Inactive Student

[smithjane]

One of my students is showing as Inactive, but is quite active, what am I missing with this?

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hello Janeal,

The "active/inactive" status has nothing to do with how much a student has participated in the class.  Rather, it's the status of their enrollment.

Typically, if Canvas enrollments are automatically updated of official enrollment information in the Student Information System, the school will set an enrollment to be "inactive" if a student has dropped the class.   Once a student's enrollment is marked "inactive", they will no longer have access to the course.

The school could also "delete" the enrollment, but that takes the student out of the roster, gradebook, etc., whereas "inactive" allows the instructor to see what the student did even after they have dropped, which can be important for things like financial aid reporting.

Mike

[JedidiahButler2]

I just experienced this now and figured out what was happening.  The other replies are true for some but for me the issue was different.

I work in high school, with multiple sections of the same course crosslisted together into one course.  If a student changes the schedule and still has me as a teacher, but now in a different section (period), they are marked as inactive from the former section.  This doesn't really showup, unless you go to gradebook and toggle the setting to show inactive students (3 dot menu in the student column).  The same was true for other students that had schedule changes and for my course it meant they were dropped from one section and added to another.