Introduction

This post basically serves a dual-purpose in that it's both a question about the topic as well as an explanation for anyone else that may encounter it. It was a weird one for me to find, but it ended up having a relatively easy workaround.

Question

Anyways, yeah, "ghost enrollments." Ever seen them? Know what causes them? Is there a better way to fix them? Is there a way to prevent them? No idea what I'm talking about? Okay, I'll explain.

Situation

So, there seem to be two methods of pulling instructor enrollments for a course via the API:

/api/v1/courses/:course_id/enrollments
/api/v1/courses/:course_id?include[]=teachers

Some months ago, I released a script that relies upon the second API call to identify the teachers of courses without having to make an additional call. Today, I found out that these lists do not always match up.

Making these calls on some of our "Master" shells, I got the following results (Note: I redacted all potentially identifiable information):

/api/v1/courses/4720/enrollments
[]

/api/v1/courses/4720?include[]=teachers
{
    "id": 4720,
    "name": "REDACTED",
    "account_id": 23,
    "uuid": "REDACTED",
    "start_at": "2014-08-04T04:00:00Z",
    "grading_standard_id": 0,
    "is_public": false,
    "course_code": "REDACTED",
    "default_view": "syllabus",
    "root_account_id": 1,
    "enrollment_term_id": 1,
    "end_at": "2015-08-05T03:59:00Z",
    "public_syllabus": false,
    "public_syllabus_to_auth": false,
    "storage_quota_mb": 500,
    "is_public_to_auth_users": false,
    "hide_final_grades": false,
    "apply_assignment_group_weights": true,
    "teachers": [
        {
            "id": 182,
            "display_name": "REDACTED",
            "avatar_image_url": "REDACTED",
            "html_url": "REDACTED"
        }
    ],
    "calendar": {
        "ics": "REDACTED"
    },
    "time_zone": "America/New_York",
    "sis_course_id": "REDACTED",
    "sis_import_id": null,
    "integration_id": null,
    "enrollments": [],
    "workflow_state": "unpublished",
    "restrict_enrollments_to_course_dates": false
}

As you can see, the first call, which mirrors the People page of the course, has nothing listed. The second call, which is what my script uses, has a user listed.

For a standard user, this is VERY confusing (at least it better be, because I was stumped at first). If we can't access their entry on the People page, how can we remove their enrollment?

Workaround

Well, as it turns out there's a fairly simple solution. For administrators, they can access the users account details and Delete the enrollment. For non-administrators with the rights to manage enrollments for the course, they can manually access the users course profile by appending "/users/:user_id" to the end of the course URL.

So, in the above case, these are the options:

Administrators-only: https://REDACTED/users/182
Non-Administrators: https://REDACTED/courses/4720/users/182