Deleting Submissions of Former Students

[SHARONSPROLES]

My Canvas course is just one week in duration. It is an orientation type of course that prepares adult learners for remote learning. Both Discussions and Assignments are used in the course. 

My problem is that student submissions accumulate week after week unless I manually delete each individual submission at the end of the week. This is really tedious! And, even after deleting all student submissions, the Discussion screen will indicate there are multiple pages of student submissions when, in fact, there are none. 

Can anyone provide a way to remove student submissions to both Discussion and Assignments quickly and efficiently as opposed to clicking on each response and clicking the Delete button? Please don't suggest importing the class anew each week. Our staffing will not allow this. Several teachers teach this course and we are all fed up with having to delete these submissions. 

[greydon]

Hello @SHARONSPROLES 

Thank you for contacting the Instructure Community. We're sorry to hear you've been experiencing issues with deleting old student submissions. There isn't a built in  feature to "delete all" student submissions in a Canvas course but are the students being removed or concluded? Or are they showing still as active in the course? Removing students manually, SIS Imports, or SIS Sync should resolve the issue and remove them and their submissions from the course. Additionally, you should be able to explore concluding them:  How do I conclude an enrollment in a course? - Instructure Community  

If a student  has finished the course, their enrollment should end and you have a few options on how to remove them as stated  above. You may want to speak with the school and consider running syncs or imports to remove students that have finished the course and their submissions should also be removed. If the students remain active, then unfortunately they would need to be deleted individually or possibly running API:

https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/submissions.html