Sometimes we encounter users, courses, or enrollments that no longer need access to the system. The user may have left the institution, they may have some pending administrative process, or they may be test users. The course may have ended years ago. At some point, we will all face the dilemma of marking users, courses, or enrollments as unavailable or disabling them... or is it better to delete them? Which of the available options is most appropriate in each case?
It is important to remember that unavailable and disabled users do not count toward the purchased license.
If we disable or mark a course as unavailable, all users in that course will also stop counting (as long as they are not enrolled in additional courses).
In the case of enrollments, they will stop counting only if the user has no additional enrollments. The difference between this option and disabling or marking the user as unavailable is that, in this case, the user could still log in to the system, although they would not have any course or organization to access, whereas with the first option, they would not be able to log in.
An unavailable user in a course will not be able to access it. A user who is unavailable at the system level will not be able to log in. The same applies to disabled users. The difference between unavailable and disabled is that disabled users are visible only to the administrator, and no actions can be performed on them while they are disabled. The same applies to courses and enrollments.
Why not delete them, then? In the case of students or enrollments, if the situation that caused them to be disabled or marked as unavailable is resolved (they return to the institution, complete the pending process, etc.), they can be reactivated and none of their work will have been lost. If they are deleted, however, the user would have to be created again or enrolled again, and there would be no record of anything completed before deletion. In the case of courses, we would have to restore them from a backup.
This is especially important in the case of students who have completed work in a course and must lose access to it. If you delete them, all work, messages, interactions, etc. will disappear, and it will not be possible to recover anything.
Because these operations can be performed for users and enrollments, we have multiple combinations and ways to manage user access within Blackboard.
If the user is the one marked as unavailable or disabled, the user does not have access to the system. If an enrollment is unavailable or disabled, the user can continue accessing the system, but not the course associated with that enrollment.
If the enrollment is unavailable, the student will see the course but will not be able to access it, and the instructor will see the student in the course marked with a diagonal bar indicating that they are unavailable. If the enrollment is disabled, the student will not see the course, and the instructor will not see the student: it is as if they did not exist.
To prevent data loss, we recommend that you never delete a user who has enrollments, or any enrollment unless the course has been backed up and saved.
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