Admins beware: An SIS import error has plagued Canvas since 2017

[james_umphres1]

Hello fellow Admins, recently my school had a serious issue with random enrollments in crosslisted sections simply not not enrolling as expected I created a community post about it here. Users were active and correct in our enrollments file and courses were crosslisted normally, it was a complete mystery.

We had a rough time with this one as it took three days of pleading and begging for Canvas support to even believe that this was actually happening. This morning they admitted, however, that there is a known issue that causes this error. Here's the note from  support explaining the error.

"From what I'm able to find this error is present in the Canvas SIS Import tool's history from the initial implementation of the SIS Import tool, as in our internal communication channels in Canvas Support this error has been present for other schools since at least 2017. However at this time we aren't able to determine if the error was occurring prior to this school year."

We are then the told the easiest solution is to remove the course_id column from the enrollments file and the students are enrolled properly. What's odd, is we've been on canvas for 5 years and have nearly 60K student body and have never encountered this before. Usually if there is a known issue, we experience it due to our size.

If you come across this glitch, you will the following SIS error in your SIS import: An enrollment listed a section (xx) and a course (xxx) that are unrelated for user (xxx)

The quickest solution for us was to remove the course_id column in our enrollments file, which worked perfectly. Massive thanks to @stimme

I hope this helps anyone who comes across it. I was completely humiliated by Canvas support this week, and I would hate for anyone else to feel that way. I suppose it's a reminder to watch those error logs!

It makes me proud of myself, though, and I'm patting myself on the back right now because I never refuse to help any of our faculty/students, I never refuse to believe them. For example, When a panicked student comes to us with "I'm sure I submitted this in canvas but the teacher didn't get it!" , I don't ignore them, I scour their activity for proof they attempted to submit. I try not to make them feel worse. After all, that's why I chose to work in education-- to help people. It's not a nice feeling to be brushed off and ignored when you're at a low point.

Also, I checked the known issues area of the community but wasn't able to find anything about this. I suppose it is quite rare though...