Historic users and courses need to be deleted for two reasons: to comply with the legal (GDPR) requirements regarding retention and storage of personal data (staff and students); and to minimise the storage costs of long-term data. Users and courses will be automatically deleted by the central Canvas team as described below.

User deletion (staff and students)

The basis for the end of the time the user (student or staff) is associated with the University is based on when their SSO expires.
For staff members, their SSO expires immediately, which means that their access to Canvas is revoked with immediate effect.
For students, when their course has completed, they will have 'leaver' status, which means that their SSO account will remain active for 11 months.
During this time, the student will have full access to Canvas, using their regular SSO login credentials, and should retain their enrolments, both those created manually and those via the Oxford Groups tool (GET).
- Note that they will lose access to email and other Microsoft365 tools after 3 months, so they will need to add an alternative communication channel to their Canvas account if they still wish to receive email notifications.
After the student’s SSO has expired, they are soft deleted from Canvas, meaning that their data will not be visible to anyone any more, but can be recovered if needed (e.g. as evidence to justify a University decision).
5 years after the soft deletion the student record is hard deleted (i.e. no longer recoverable).
As of November 2020 the period of 11 months has been temporarily extended to 23 months to accommodate students impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Note: non-SSO (external) user accounts will be automatically deleted after 13 months of inactivity (having received three warnings during the 12th month of inactivity).

Course deletion

For students, Student Registry recommends a minimum of 6 years' retention of student data in order to provide the University with legal protection (six years is the limit for appeals, etc.) [Please note: whether the minimum time period is 5 or 6 years is still being finalised].
All Canvas courses with a Term end date, or a different specified End Date will be automatically soft deleted 11 years thereafter.
If there is no Term end date or specified End Date, then the course will be automatically soft deleted 19 years after its Start Date.
The course deletion will be made permanent 1 year after the soft deletion.

If there are no terms dates and no specified start and end dates, then the course will be excluded from the deletion process.

Important cautionary notes:

Any personal student information in the Canvas course should be kept to a minimum – e.g. students should be advised not to include personal data in their free-text submissions, such as discussions. This is because the course data will be kept for a much longer period than the user record.
Staff may want to remove their own personal data that is not essential to the running of the course (e.g. if a member of staff was on a course in its first year, and the course includes their name, picture, etc then the current course owner should review whether this data is still useful, relevant, and if its continued use can be justified, and delete it if not).
There are mechanisms by which staff can download specific data onto their own computers, e.g. assignment submissions and grades. Clearly, such files are under your own control and timely disposal thereof is encouraged.