[Groups] Group Enrollments should Match Course Enrollments

[hvaughn]

Groups created from an enrollment within a course should always reflect the current status of that course's enrollment. It is a pain for instructors to have to manually remove students from course project groups, especially in large enrollment classes.

Scenario: Earlier in the semester, an instructor created a group set for an assignment and added five groups. Students were dispersed among those groups at that time. Since that time several students have withdrawn from the course. These students have remained as group members, even though they have been withdrawn from the course. If a student withdraws from a course, the student should also be removed from the group, at least that makes sense to me. So I contacted Canvas support.

Canvas Support's Response: "When a group is created within a course it also creates an entirely separate page or group area for these students within the groups. This area has its own set of people for the course, its own “enrollments” if you will. When they withdraw from the course their enrollment in the course is removed, but the status in the group is retained. You can go under the page for the group and remove the student from the people page if they should no longer appear there. But in short, group pages are kind of like a course in that they have their own set of enrollments and access levels. Users will need to removed from group pages."

My opinion:  Groups created from an enrollment within a course should always reflect that course's enrollment. It is a pain for instructors to have to manually remove students from course project groups, especially in large classes. We have a policy that once a student is withdrawn, they should no longer have access to any future course assignments, materials, etc. If the student remains in the group and new content is added to the group space for new assignments, then the student would have access to materials after they have withdrawn from a course. This is an issue for us. We have several courses that create group spaces to work on projects for the duration of the semester.

[scottdennis]

Hi Holly,

I think this is a good idea.  Thanks for submitting.  It will go to vote March 2nd.

Thanks,

Scott

[RobDitto]

Fans of : this excellent idea is different.

Even though Canvas Support evidently told  @hvaughn  that inactive students' group memberships are currently retained by design, based on the Inactive Students still showing in Groups discussion it also seems as though some institutions have been told something different.  If your institution is affected by group memberships persisting for students with inactive or concluded enrollments, then it's worthwhile reporting that to Canvas Support currently to help populate the "tracker"  @tmd194 ​ mentioned.

[biray]

This idea has moved to the next stage and will be open for voting among the Canvas Community, from Wed. March 2, 2016 - Wed. June 1, 2016.

Check out this doc for additional details about how the voting process works!

[iys2]

Hi Holly and everyone,

I could not agree more as we have experienced this as well and it is a nightmare and have reported this on our end.

I was so excited to receive the following message a few days ago from Canvas Support that:

"Hello, Our engineers have created a fix that has passed initial QA testing. The next step is for this fix to be deployed to our Beta environment, where it will be available for Teachers and other Administrators to test, and to ensure it is working properly before it will be added to our live Production environment. We will provide another update once the fix has been applied to the Beta environment, or if there are any other changes to its status. This ticket will remain in an "On-Hold" status at this time. We appreciate your patience throughout the process of testing and implementing a fix for this issue - if you have any questions about this message or the status of this fix, please feel free to contact Support. Keep Learning! Support Panda Notifier of Things"

I am so hoping that the message I received will be pushed out for Beta testing and then to production:)

Thanks for posting this idea.

[lmd5]

This is the info we got on this issue:

CNVS-26414 - "Enrollments concluded by section date don't have their group membership concluded" - Code work has been completed and patch is in place. However, it will not be deployed until our standard release because it is part of an "epic", with other related fixes....pushing one element would potentially create other issues that are addressed by the other associated JIRAs.

So, the fix is done, we are just in a holding pattern for the entirety of the EPIC to be deployed in our next release cycle~

[iys2]

Thanks for the update Lisa:)

[hockin]

At our institution, students may be administratively dropped from a course due to financial reasons.  Once the financial reasons have been resolved (or upon manually re-enrollment by the instructor), the students are re-added to the course.

In another LMS that our school administers, group assignments (groups enrollment) are not retained once the student has been re-added to the course. 

If this feature is enabled, I hope that upon re-enrollment in the course, the student's group assignments (enrollments) are also re-instated.

[erinhmcmillan]

Hi, all,

You'll find these behaviors resolved as part of the Canvas Production Release Notes (2016-04-02). Please see the Fixed Bugs section about Groups for more information.

Thank you!

Erin

[hfchen]

I have created a new idea that's an extension of this one. Let me know what you guys think.

[Renee_Carney]

Thank you to  @hvaughn  for submitting this idea, as well as,  @RobDitto ​,  @iys2 ​,  @lmd5 ​,  @hockin ​, hfchen for your contributions. Your investment in this idea helped refine a feature which is now part of Canvas!