Provide option to disable login merge system-wide

[dsweeney2]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

If users have more than one login to a Canvas instance they are given the option to merge the identities. This consolidates the two distinct user accounts into a single account with two logins. We have an issue where our integration enrols a student identified by their sis_user_id, which resides at the login level, but the effect is that the user-level entity is enrolled instead. This means that we often see the wrong login details in our gradebook for merged identities. This has cascading implications as we seek to feed final grades into our student system as it becomes difficult to identify the relevant students. To avoid this we need to split the identities again, which is a fraught process.

The idea is to provide a system-wide feature option to toggle whether or not an institution would like to offer students the ability to merge their identities. This would:

• stop users being shown the option to merge identities
• existing merges would remain in place and splits could still be done
• ability to merge identities would still be possible through the API with the existing permissions

[pburton]

Another use case for this feature would be for staff and faculty members with admin permissions that are also students at your organization. 

As a university, many of our staff and faculty receive the benefit of Continuing Education where the university will pay for one degree at each level and allows our staff the ability to complete a master's or doctorate degree.   The issue this brings to the table is we need two separate user accounts to separate admin permissions from normal participant accounts.  Resulting in all of our admin users having 2 accounts with the same email address and a continuing option to merge the accounts which we have to tell them not to do.  

A feature like this would give us the ability to either turn the feature off completely or have the ability through user creation/update either via the API, or SIS Import to mark a user shouldn't be merged with any other account.

[Stef_retired]

Comments from Instructure

Admins can disable user merging for an account.

Currently Canvas allows all admins to merge user accounts if they have permission. However, institutions can prevent users from being able to merge users in an account by turning off the Self Service User Merge feature option in Account Settings. This change benefits accounts that use a student information system (SIS) to manage user enrollments or are part of a Canvas consortium.

For more information, please read through the  Canvas Deploy Notes (2021-06-23).