Processing Incompletes

[casey_eubank]

We are having some issues with student access to courses when they have an incomplete.

To give you a little background:

Our SIS is Banner.

We currently have our SIS course create CSV feed files that are set to run every four hours in Canvas and they send the same course information every four hours including start/end dates and status.

We are different in that we have multiple start/end dates for courses throughout the whole semester.  Some courses run 16 weeks, others run 8 weeks, some for 2 weeks, some for 5 days, etc.

For start dates, we automatically subtract 7 days from the course start date in Banner and make that date the course start date in Canvas. 

For end dates, we automatically add 14 days to the course end date in Banner and make that date the end date in Canvas.

We have turned off the ability for faculty to publish, un-publish, conclude, or un-conclude classes.

We also have course access set up based on start/end dates and not term start/end dates.

When a course is first added to the course CSV file and it is more than 7 days before the Banner course start date, we send over the active status for the course so it gets created and remains unpublished.

When it is 7 days before the Banner course start date, we send over published as the status for that course.  We continue to send over the "published" status for that course until it is 14 days after the Banner course end date.  Then after that, we send over the "concluded status" for that course until the end of the semester.

Our issue is that sometimes we have incompletes and we are setting up incompletes using a new section as referenced in option #3 in the solution in this Community post: Solved: How does your school/institution handle incomplete... - Instructure Community - 469289 (canv...

However, if the incomplete due date for the student is more than 14 days after the end date, the course gets concluded by the SIS CSV feed file, and then the student is locked out of the course.  So, as an admin, we have to manually un-conclude the course so the student has access again.  However, in 4 hours or less (depending on when we un-concluded the course), the SIS CSV file runs again and concludes the course, and the student is locked out again.

Any suggestion on how to allow students with incompletes to access the course without it being concluded and then we have to un-conclude and then it concludes again?  But also still allows us to use the statuses (active, published, and concluded) for courses that do not have an incomplete?

Also according to this article: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Admin-Guide/How-do-I-format-CSV-text-files-for-uploading-SIS-data... if we manually un-conclude the the status of the course, doesn't that make it the new status "sticky" and shouldn't it not be updated when the SIS CSV file runs again?  Is this a bug?

Thank you in advance for your help!

[mzimmerman]

Hi @casey_eubank ,

We don't really "conclude" courses here, just set an end date at the term/course/section level. 

What is the intent behind setting the course to be "completed" (concluded) in addition to setting a course end date?  I agree that (according to the docs) that setting should be sticky, but as far as I can tell from our experience, it is sticky--we sent an "active" course status in our feeds, leaving it to instructors to publish the course via the GUI, and the course stays "published" despite subsequent feeds with an "active" setting.

There is also a "concluded" status for individual enrollments.  Perhaps sending a "concluded" status for the course is also setting a "concluded" status on all the individual enrollments?

In your situation, I might look at trying to manage the "concluded" status at the individual enrollment level, rather than at the course level, though I can imagine that might be a headache to configure the integration to pass the status that way....

[chriscas]

We are a very similar setup here.  We do most things by term dates, but handle incompletes through manual sections.  I am also unsure that force concluding the course is necessary when dates (term, course, or section) are being used.  It seems like that might just be doubling up unnecessarily.  @casey_eubank, have you tried just using the dates to conclude courses instead of sending the conclude via SIS?  Does that have a different result in Canvas?  I'd be curious to hear more.

-Chris