Is there a good way to hide groups or mark them in-active?

[woodsdm2]

I use groups in many different ways in my classes and have recently been getting some comments from students about the large number of groups they have to manage across all of their courses.

In looking at this from the student perspective, I can see what they mean.  They may have 10 or more groups, but in looking at the groups for my classes, I know that many of the groups are no longer being used.  For example, I may have a series of short assignments, each with a different set of groups, but once the assignment is complete, the group isn't needed.  However, I can't delete the group because there are assignments tied to the group.  The also may be content in the group area that the students may want to refer back to.  

Do other people have students commenting (or complaining) about the number of groups they are in?  

Has anyone found a good way to manage this?

If not, what do you think of having a way for an instructor to mark a group "in-active?"  Then groups could be displayed similar to how courses are displayed, with a list of "active" groups and an "all groups" link to allow access to in-active groups.

I do see a proposal to https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/10928-allow-students-to-remove-groups?sr=search&searchId=766b1...‌, but at least for course groups, I see value in keeping the group, but maybe having a better way to manage the list of groups.

[Robbie_Grant]

 @woodsdm2 ,

First, I want to apologize for your question sitting in the community for so long without a response.

Second, it looks like you have stumped the Canvas Community.  Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.

Robbie

[woodsdm2]

Hi Robbie,

Thanks for responding.  I didn't get any suggestions, so I am working to reduce the number of different groups I use in my classes.  This isn't ideal, but I can appreciate how messy it is for students when they are in a lot of groups and there is no way to hide groups that are no longer active.

Dave

[tamara_becker]

We have the same issue.

[hakan_liljegren]

We also have this issue. We usually have small groups for one assignment, and then we have new groups for the next assignment. For the full course we might have 12 groups / assignment (or more) and maybe 8 - 10 assignments in course => 120 groups in the course. A flag like this would be really helpful! (Or if the students could hand in, in groups without actually creating one it would also solve our problem.

[susan_oconnell]

We have this issue too.

Also, as an instructor, it is difficult for me to manage the number of groups especially as there is currently no easy way to list (and extract) all groups and students within them (listing the group and clicking on each expand symbol is time consuming. In addition, when grading a group in speedgrader, it would be helpful to see the students' names who are in that group.

[BethSmithWgtn]

I have a connected question: is there a way to hide the visibility of groups from students? we have some groups set up for students eg. tutorial groups or project groups which they need to see, but then have other groups which are used to allocated a list of student to marker but we don't want the students to see these groups. haven't found any way to hide this. you can do anonymous grading but that hides the student identity but was to hide the marker group. but still see the student identity within the group??

[milesl]

I created a feature request to address this issue:

Starring/Unstarring a Course Should determine whet... - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)