Canvas @ Yale

Why can't I remove some students from my course?

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Official enrollments are synced from student registration worksheets into Canvas, and cannot be removed from Canvas by instructors.

Courses for the Current Semester

SOLUTION: Official enrollments added to Canvas by a student's Registration / Canvas worksheet can only be removed by that student dropping the course from their Registration / Canvas worksheet.

When students are selecting courses for the semester, they add their prospective courses to their Registration / Canvas worksheets via Yale Course Search, Online Course Selection (OCS), or by working directly with a registrar.**

Once a course is added to a student's worksheet they will automatically be enrolled into the course's Canvas site within 2 hours. Because official enrollments are created in an external system (like Banner), and then synced to Canvas, official enrollments cannot be modified or removed directly in Canvas.

Any modification to official enrollments must be made in the system where the enrollment originated. Official Canvas enrollments populated by a student's Registration / Canvas worksheet can only be removed by that student dropping the course from their worksheet.

** Some professional schools may use other methods for students to officially visit / register for courses.  

Official enrollments in your course will have the Visitor, Student, or Auditor role. These roles are used to indicate official enrollments and should not be used when manually adding users to course sites.  

If I cannot remove them via the Canvas People tool, how do official enrollments get dropped from my Canvas course during the course selection periods?

SEND A REQUEST TO THE STUDENT

Contact the student and ask them to remove the course from their worksheet. Once the student removes the course, their enrollment in the Canvas course will be automatically removed within 2 hours.

WAIT FOR THE END OF THE ADD / DROP PERIOD

After the close of the latest school's add / drop period Visitor enrollments will be removed automatically.  Announcements are posted within Canvas and on the Canvas login page when visitor removal will occur. Review our End of Add / Drop Period article for more information.

Courses for Past Semesters

SOLUTION:  Enrollments cannot be removed from courses after the term ends.

When the academic term ends, all courses shift to a read-only state. Once the course is in this state, enrollments cannot be added or removed from the site.  

If you need to remove a user, you will need to first unlock the course and then you will be able to add / remove users. 

If you have any questions or need additional help, please contact [email protected].

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