Based on recent events, there may be questions posed about guest accounts in your Canvas LMS, and whether they should be suspended after a given time. Canvas Admins can pull a “Last User Access” report in their settings and sort oldest login date to newest. There also will be a column called “User ID” which is normally a unique seven-digit number in the user account’s URL.

I wanted to see if I could bulk-suspend, not delete, guest accounts that haven’t signed into my Canvas instance in over six years. So I had a conversation with an AI agent.

What resulted was a handy-dandy Python script that I can run from my desktop computer that requires three things:

  1. A specified domain for your insitution, e.g. canvasinsider.instructure.com
  2. An access token for an API call
  3. An Excel .csv file with the User IDs in a list

Here is what a proof of concept looks like. You might want to watch this in full screen mode to see the details:

If you would like to obtain a copy of my Python script, send me an email. I’m happy to share the info that helps keep my university LMS a little bit more secure.

Thanks for your time. Have a good day,

Chris

[email protected]