When an expiry managed waitlist is switched to manual management, any active course opening notifications remain active.
What is the Issue?
When a course section that is expiry managed is updated to be managed manually, if there are active course opening notifications, they will not be canceled. The course opening notification will remain with the student it was issued to and, if the student skips, declines, or their offer expires, the offer will continue to be sent to the next student on the waitlist until a student registers in the seat.
In some cases, if the course section was full at the time the course opening notification was issued (see known issues), the student may not be able to take the seat offered by the course opening notification.
If a student drops a seat in the course after the switch to manual management, new course opening notifications will not be issued. This issue only exists for active course opening notifications at the time of the change to manual waitlist management.
Who is Impacted?
- Students on the waitlist
- Staff who manage waitlists
What is the impact?
- Students may not be able to take the seat from the notification
- Course section may be overenrolled
- Confusion amongst staff who see an open course opening notification even though the course is manually managed
What is the status?
We have identified a process to "reset" the waitlists so the notifications will no longer be in the system. See additional details for the Workaround.
Additional details:
Workaround:
Please execute the following steps to "reset" the Waitlist for each section that is still sending out notifications:
- View the waitlist from the Course Section Definition and export to excel to retain the Waitlist order for Step 5 below.
- Ensure that the Manually Manage Waitlist Promotion setting is selected.
- Starting from the bottom of the Waitlist, remove students by clicking the "Remove" button. Make sure you first remove all students who do not have a "Yes" listed under the Has Course Opening Notification and get to the students who do have "Yes" listed at the very end. This is important because if you start with the "Yes" students, the notifications will just keep going to the next student and that's not what we want.
- Do step (3) until the Waitlist is completely clear.
- Now, you can add students back to the Waitlist using the "Waitlist Student in Course" task OR you can use "Mass Register Students" task and make sure that the "Enable Waitlisting" checkbox is selected.
------ Waitlist Student in Course Task - best suited for small sections where you are adding only a handful of students as you will need to do this student by student. The benefit of using this task is that you are creating the Waitlist in the order that you need.
------ Mass Register Students Task - best suited for large sections where you are adding tens of students back onto the Waitlist. Make sure the "Enable Waitlisting" checkbox is selected. If the Graded Waitlisted Section that you are fixing is part of a cluster, then you will need to make the requisite selections among the Non-Graded sections (which should not have Waitlists setup) in order for the Mass Register to not fail. The students will only be Waitlisted into the Graded section and the non-graded sections will be ignored by the task but they do need to be selected. The drawback of using the Mass Register task is that students will be added in random order and any students who have time conflicts or registration holds will not be added. So you may need to go back to adding them using the Waitlist Student in Course Task. Once the Mass Register is completed, all your students will be Waitlisted and you can use the Reorder Waitlist functionality to restore the order of the waitlist.
At the end of the steps above, your Waitlist has been reset. If you wish, you can now turn off Manually Manage Waitlist and spots will be offered to students as they become available.