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Inactive students in a Canvas course have withdrawn from the course in Banner, and they will remain enrolled in the course as inactive students to maintain a record of their enrollment. Unfortunately, Canvas does not offer a way to remove or hide inactive students on the People page; however, if a student shows as inactive, they can be ignored.
Instructors who would prefer not to see inactive students in their Canvas course have two workarounds they can utilize to address this, but each option comes with its own caveats (more work and slower update time, respectively). For a list of only active students in the course, faculty can always view or download the list of students from the Gradebook.
Tags on the People Page
This option requires a bit more work but allows for a view of only active students in the course from the People page.
While on the People page, create a Tag for the active students in the course, for example, Active Students, and then apply that tag to all students who are not flagged as inactive. A filter can then be applied to only view users with that newly created Active Students tag. This will filter down the user list on the People page to only students with active enrollments. Faculty will need to remove and/or apply that tag to students throughout the add/drop period as new students enroll in or withdraw from the course.
The Canvas Community site provides additional details on setting up differentiation tags.
Utilize Course Analytics
This option requires less work but only updates every 24 hours. To view a list of active students, access the Course Analytics page and navigate to the Students tab. This will show a list of only active students, along with their most recent activity in the course. This is straightforward alternative to the People page, with the one drawback that the Analytics only updates once per day. That means any new students added in the past 24 hours, and any recent student activity, may not be reflected immediately.
The Canvas Community site provides additional details on accessing the student list via Course Analytics.