Temporarily Add Users (Faculty Observers) to Course for a set amount of time?

Our courses are randomly put up for auditing by the Administration and in order for the auditors to have temporary access, we a calendar to keep track of who, when, and where each has to be.

Is there a way to set an expiration on a specific user's enrollment in a course to provide two weeks of access to the course within a set of dates?

If there isn't, could canvas add something that allows a canvas admin to add a user to a course for a specific period of time?

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greydon

Hello @MarkLopes

Thank you for contacting the Instructure Community. We're sorry to hear you've been experiencing issues with temporarily adding users to courses. There have been others looking for similar options in Canvas:

Solved: Can I create temporary students for a Training Cou... - Instructure Community

As of now, there is no time limit feature to automatically unenroll users from a course after they've been added. You could explore custom API but Canvas doesn't have any API calls for this at the time. You have a handful of options for removing users from the course in bulk but right now there is nothing that will do this after X amount of time has passed.

Feel free to check out our Ideas and Theme forum as Canvas implements great ideas such as this that they find within the community.

Canvas Ideas and Themes - Instructure Community

Code-with-Ski

It looks like this is an upcoming feature on the Canvas Product Roadmap. It is currently listed as Q4 2023 - Q1 2024.

The Enroll a user API endpoint has parameters to set a start date and end date. Since this is the most specific level of enrollment dates, it should override any dates set for term, course, and section. However, I would recommend testing to know for sure. The SIS Import also allows you to set a start date and end date for enrollments.

MarkLopes

Hello @Code-with-Ski and @greydon,

I went into the API and found what @Code-with-Ski described. The only issue with using enrollment start and end dates is that even though the enrollment end date has passed, the user is able to access/view the course from their "All Courses" page. If there was an option from the Conclude, deactivate, or delete an enrollment API endpoint in the Enroll a user API endpoint, then the user would be deleted/removed from the course instead of just concluding enrollment. This is necessary for my team as we have to add and remove several faculty members for course reviews.

@greydon,

This feature would need to be to delete the user at a specified time, not unenroll.

Code-with-Ski

@MarkLopes

Ok, that makes sense. Hopefully the new feature they are working on takes that into consideration for temporary enrollments.

In the meantime, have you tried using the endpoint you mentioned to make the enrollment inactive or delete it? You will need to get the enrollment ID (not user ID) to use this, but it should allow you to delete or inactive users from a course too.

Also, are these temporary user accounts that they should no longer have access to after the specified time or just no longer have access to the course? You mentioned wanting to delete the user at a specified time, but I wasn't sure if you meant only deleting their enrollment in that course or deleting the entire user account since you also said they are faculty members.

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