How to delete/remove/hide older courses from previous terms

Hello. It was asked of me to investigate the best way to delete/remove/hide older courses from previous terms completely from view of instructors and students. We would like these courses to not show when a user clicks the "All Courses" option to show previous courses that they were a part of.

Wondering what other institutions may have done regarding this task?

Thanks!

Jeff Morgan

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Accepted answers

Adam Ware

Hi Morgan,

Before providing a solution, i suggest keeping the following resources handy:
- Terms, Courses, and Section Enrollments - This page explains how term, course, and section dates interact within Canvas to manage student access and participation. It provides guidance on using these dates to extend or limit course visibility and explains the hierarchy of date overrides for specific enrollment scenarios. (video can also be found here)
- Student Course Visibility and Participation Flowchart|

These resources will allow you to curate a solution based on desired student and teacher outcomes and the end of a prescribed term.

All comments

Maria Rijean Therese Velasco

Hi! I saw a similar question in the Canvas Community recently. One response mentioned that there isn’t really a way to fully hide old courses from the All Courses list without deleting them.

They shared that while some institutions consider moving courses into an “archive” subaccount, that approach has a lot of limitations and doesn’t fully remove courses from view. What worked for them instead was implementing a course retention policy and deleting courses once they reached a certain age (they settled on 7 years). That was the only method they found that completely removed old courses from instructor and student views.

Hope this helps!

Adam Ware

NoahBoswell

Hey @morgan_j !

For students, you can restrict visibility of the course before and after the course start date. You can enable these settings at the account-level of your instance. These will prohibit students from viewing them in both their future enrollments list as well as past enrollments list.

When it comes to instructors, that's not as easy, as Canvas is designed to provide teachers with access to their past courses as long as they hold an enrollment within that course (even if their enrollment is concluded). Now, I've never used Canvas with an SIS connected to it, but I wonder if there's a way that you can bulk delete courses at the end of the semester or year?

I hope that helps a little!
Noah

Chris

You may be referring to posts I've made about this topic in the past, as the details sound like our retention policy: Learning Management System Course Retention Policy | University of Michigan-Dearborn. I posted a blog about the technical process we use for this at Retention Policy (Course Deletion) Script - Instructure Community as well.

I'm not sure if @morgan_j needs to go this route or something perhaps simpler though. I know removing courses form the lost was mentioned, but perhaps just removing access to the courses, whole leaving them in the lost would suffice? As @Adam Ware already pointed out, there are a lot of different ways this could be handled, and it's hard to recommend one over the other without knowing all the details. I'd probably start with term/course dates and restrictions, as those have the least downside (in my opinion… little to no affect on records, grades, etc). If that doesn't work, start considering hard-concluding enrollments or courses, or a long-term retention policy like we implemented (or some combination of those), keeping in mind these methods may start to remove some data form the Canvas UI.

I'm happy to chat about this further if there's interest.

-Chris

melodyc_lam

You can bulk delete courses at the end of the semester or year, but if they're SIS-created, you DO need to make sure you're doing this between when you cease getting data from the SIS and resume getting data from the SIS (the "rollover" period) and also maintain compliance with your district's retention policy and also make sure that you're deleting ONLY the courses you want. In most cases, your SIS team is already scheduling for the next school year so in Canvas you'll have a mix of courses from the current year and the next year.

I recommend for a bulk delete of SIS-created courses to use a SIS export report to pull the courses, modify the file to only include what you want to delete, then import it back into Canvas using the SIS import system.

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