User Management

How Ryerson Deals with 'Dropped' Students

This section explains what happens in your Blackboard course shell when students drop your course.

*Note: We recommend that instructors/designers do not manually add (enroll) or delete students from their courses, as it will conflict with our automated system. If you have an urgent situation, please contact us at courses@ryerson.ca for options.

• Student is Disabled in the Course
• Course Owner may Hide Student from the Grade Center
• Course Owner may Delete Student from the Course

Student is Disabled in the Course

If a student has dropped your course, we will 'disable' them in the course.

Check the 'Available' column to see if a student has been dropped from the course shell.

This means that the student will still appear in your user list, however, the student will not be able to access the course at that point.

If you look in your user list (through Users and Groups > Users), you will see an 'Available' column that identifies which students currently are enabled or disabled in the course.

Why are we 'disabling' students, rather than removing them?

• Instructor Control: Many instructors have indicated that they want to know who has accessed their course. Disabling students instead of removing them gives the instructor more control over this.

• Retaining important information: Sometimes a student drops a course and decides to rejoin the course, and sometimes students are temporarily disabled due to administrative issues such as unpaid fees... Disabling students retains their information in the course (including any communication, submissions of assignments, etc.) so if the instructor reinstates the student in the course, they may just pick up where they left off. Deleting the student would remove any record of the student in that course.

Course Owner may Hide Dropped Students from the Grade Center

Introduced in Blackboard 9, Smart Views allow you to limit what you are seeing in the Grade Center. One of the uses of Smart Views is to hide students who have been dropped from the course by only showing students whose status in the course shell is 'Available'. First, you will want to check to see whether you already have this smart view in your course shell - if not, you will have to set one up.

1. Go to Control Panel > Grade Center.
2. Click the Filter button, to the right of the top menu, and the Current View menu will open. Click on the dropdown menu to the right of that, and see if there is a Smart View called Hide Dropped Students. If there is, simply click on this option to enable it. If this Smart View is not listed, you will have to proceed with the remaining steps.
3. In the menu area, go to Manage > Smart Views.
4. Click the Create Smart View button.
5. Name: you can enter anything you like here - I reccomend "Hide Dropped Students".
6. Type of View: Custom
7. Select Criteria: From the dropdown menus (by clicking the arrows) and the radio buttons (by clicking inside the circle), select the following criteria: Availability Equal to Available
8. Filter Results: Columns to display in results, use dropdown menu to select "All Columns"
9. Click Submit to continue
10. Repeat Step 2 above to enable this Smart View.

Note that the dropped students have disappeared from your list. They have not been deleted from the course - they are just hidden from the Grade Center when you are using this particular Smart View.

If you would like to automatically load this particular Smart View (instead of the full Grade Center), click the Set as Default button next to the selected Current View.

* Click here for more info on Grade Center Smart Views.

Course Owner may Delete Student from the Course

If this option does not meet your needs - if you need for the dropped students to be permanently deleted from the course entirely - there is a way for you to manually delete them.

We try not to encourage deleting of students, if any of the alternatives are sufficient for the instructor, mostly because the removal of the wrong student - and all of their work in the course - is possible.

Deletion is permanent, and cannot be reversed. While a student can be re-added to a course, their work that has been deleted cannot. This is why it is important that you know for sure that a student has officially dropped the course before you delete them. Students are sometimes temporarily dropped from enrollment due to payment issues, errors, etc. - deleting these students could negatively impact their ability to continue in the course, depending on how much of their work and graded activity resides in the Blackboard course shell.

1. Go to Control Panel > Users and Groups > Users
2. Look at the search criteria, and change the second option from 'Contains' to 'Not Blank'. Click the 'Go' button. This will list all students in your course.
3. If you have multiple pages of students here, scroll to the very bottom of the page and click the "Show All" button. This will list all of the students in one page.
4. Start at the top, and look for the students whose 'Available' status is 'No'. There is no point deleting anyone listed with an Availability of 'Yes', because our enrollment system has not dropped them and they will be re-added to the course overnight.
5. For each student whose 'Available' status is 'No', please look at the student's name. If you are confident that the student has actually dropped the course, check the checkbox to the left of the student's listing. Continue to do this until you have gone through the whole list of students.
6. To delete the students that have been checked, simply click the 'Remove Users from Course' button found at the top and the bottom of the list.