Re: Kicking someone out of a canvas course (2024)

I saw that someone posted a document with the Stickiness settings while I was typing the response - that was helpful, but not for what you want to do. Your SIS keeps on putting them back into the section and there needs to be some way to keep it from doing that.

We consider our SIS to be authoritative. There are times it messes up, especially when it comes to dropping people who signed up for the payment plan and it does it at the end of the first week of classes, late in the day, so that students can't get it taken care of and are dropped from Canvas over that first weekend. Bad all around, but that's not the issue you're facing.

Without knowing the use case, I'd say that something needs to change in the SIS. You probably can't control that, but if the student isn't supposed to be in the Canvas course, then they probably shouldn't be in the course. There are some cases I can think of like those who are not supposed to use computers as part of their sentence, but then they shouldn't have any access to Canvas, not just a particular course.

In no particular order, here are some things that might trigger a workable solution.

• Drop them from the SIS. If it's a case where there is some legal reason why they cannot be in the course (harassment of another student, injunction, etc.) then the instructor should remove them from the course, which would drop them in the SIS, and keep them out of the course.
• Lock them out of the system completely. We have done this with some students who we needed to get in touch with us and didn't respond to any emails, phone calls, etc. We locked their account in Active Directory so that they couldn't log in at all, including Canvas, and then notified all the people they might contact to direct them to the appropriate person. Once they did that, we opened it back up.
• Stop doing full updates and do incremental ones. Then the SIS updates would stop overwriting the UI changes. We don't use Peoplesoft's products, but ours puts a timestamp on all enrollment changes and I use it to look for recent changes when sending the information to Canvas. That allows us to keep the imports small enough that we can update every 20 minutes. We do have to make sure the imports are successful, so I run an overnight full update -- which would recreate your current problem.
• Move them in the SIS into a new section and specify different dates for that section in Canvas. This is probably the most reasonable solution not knowing the justification for dropping them from Canvas but not the course. You could make the argument that they need to be in a special non-Canvas section. This would also be the case in a legal situation, then you could mark them as only being able to see other students in their own section (which doesn't work for discussions) so you might need to make a completely separate course.
• Create a new status in the SIS (this probably won't fly): Registered, Withdrawn, Hold (or Pending or Locked) and then make that Hold get transferred across as a Completed or Inactive.
• Add some other flag to the SIS. Make it kind of like an accommodation request, although I suspect that's not the real reason they need deleted from the Canvas course. This essentially becomes an override system.
• Write special code. My opinion of our SIS fails to register on the scale. Accordingly, I custom wrote the system that populates our imports. Our SIS doesn't actually have any clue which courses use Canvas, it's maintained on a separate system. We have to check that students have completed the mandatory Canvas orientation before they get into their courses, but they need to get into the orientation and student clubs without it. I put the students who haven't completed the orientation into a special "Need student orientation" section inside each course that starts the last day of the course and ends the next day. That way they can see the course but can't get into it and the instructor can see that they are in it but need to complete the orientation. Our SIS knows nothing of that special section either. From what you wrote to Kelley, it sounds like your programming skills may not afford you that opportunity -- and honestly, if our SIS would have handled it, it would have been a lot easier.