Colleague and Removing Instructors

[armanirivera]

Long story, but I promise the context is necessary- saves time asking questions and repeated suggestions.

We use Ellucian Colleague as our SIS, and we import data into Canvas using the SIS integration (we have SQL-generated CSV's that send data periodically throughout the day via SFTP). 

With this current method, we're having an issue figuring out how to remove instructors from a course shell in Canvas. Previously, our Registrar would just delete instructors from the associated section in Colleague. This left no historical record to conditionally write a value of "deleted" in the status field of the Enrollments file. For example, for students, it's easy: we track their changes with "Add," "Drop," "Withdraw-" with the latter two being scenarios of the conditional that would determine the "deleted" value in the file, and so, removing them from the respective section in Canvas. 

In Colleague, instructors do not have these statuses, and since we were deleting them, there was no way to communicate to Canvas that an instructor should be removed from a course shell- we would only find out when someone reported it. Where instructors are assigned (on Colleague, it's a screen called "FASC"), it does include "Start/End Date" fields, and even a dropdown of Teaching Arrangements they've recently started to try to use more. So, I initially coded the status line to conditionally remove instructors that meet ALL of the below criteria: 

• Instructor has an End Date that is before the course's listed end date in Colleague.

• Instructor's End Date is before "today" (the date of which the reports are sent)- so any instructors who would've been ended "yesterday" 
• Instructor does NOT have the Teaching Arrangement value set to "Primary Instructor."

This worked, but not in the way we'd expect. In fact, it seems to have caused our Registrar more grief. Since the Start/End Dates is something they've never had to worry about before, we knew little about it; it seemed like upon entering the instructor into FASC, it would automatically populate dates based on the course's Start/End. We were wrong- it's was defaulting the Start/End of the semester the course was in. This poses a bigger problem than we realized, because we also have plenty of non-traditional courses that do not follow the traditional semester schedule (some may start at the end of one semester, and continue into the next- but still be listed as the previous one). Because of this, the Registrar started receiving multiple reports of being removed from sections on Canvas (because initially, we thought it was just them mis-entering a couple courses, so we were telling them to reach out to the Registrar to fix it on Colleague- but now we're finding there's even more to this, and it's not their fault). 

Furthermore, regardless if an End Date has passed, the old instructors still come up on the Course Catalog of students' Self Service page (user-side interface of Colleague, geared towards faculty and students, with limited functionalities for administrative staff- who typically use "Colleague UI," where FASC resides). The old instructors also still stay on the students' schedules as well.

I then proposed creating an additional Teaching Arrangement value of "Former Instructor," and then I can adjust the code to simply look for this value and treat it as a "flag" to set an instructor's status to "deleted." That still isn't enough though, because we've found that it still affects the Registrar's reporting, as these instructors will stay on the record for this course. But, this is just a cosmetic marker, more for reporting purposes. These values do not actually indicate anything of "ending" an instructor's role- so the same reporting problems exist here as with End Date adjustments.

So now we're at a loss on how to remove instructors using the SIS file import integration, with what Colleague is capable of- and without causing more chaos in our short-staffed Registrar team. If I understand APIs well enough, if I'm not mistaken, the two systems (Canvas and Colleague) would be constantly communicating back and forth, and would likely catch when an instructor is removed from a course,  and it will show the same in Canvas, correct?- assuming we allow our Registrar to go back to deleting instructors...But, it's unforeseeable how soon we could get something like that going (it's been asked for for years, but too many other things take up the priority list, even today). 

Are there any other Canvas SIS Integration + Colleague who could provide insight on how they handle instructor removals? Our Instructional Design department kickstarted this project, as they anticipate more manual work in the future for instructor removals, and it does not seem like a sustainable solution, when this can be automated. They've insisted seeing such a process exist in other institutions, but do not have any reference for schools with our same setup. 

Thank you!