New Courses or Sections?

[kateyalee]

We are creating online courses for some teacher training.  We are expecting up to 500 people enrolled in a course.  What is the best way to manage this?  We have 12 instructors to help manage and monitor work.  Do I create a course for each of them?  Or would it be best to have one course and then multiple sections?  I'm just trying to wrap my head around this.  

[James · Accepted solution]

 @kateyalee  

You should look at whether everyone will be enrolling at the same time vs open enrollment and whether there are any due dates.

If it's all at the same time (like a semester-based course), then you can have a single course with multiple sections to make it easier for faculty to manage. If it is a proceed at your own pace without due dates then it could work as a single course. You could put people into sections to act as cohorts to make management easier.

If it is offered at different times and there are due dates for things, then different courses is probably the better way to do things. You should not keep a course open for years and just keep adding sections, you have to use differentiated assignments and then it becomes messy.

Others have taken large, open-enrollment courses and tried to make them work with a single course, but there is no rolling due-dates in Canvas where something is due 5 days after you start the course. Having a single course makes analytics easier, but makes things slower since there is more data to load (roster, gradebook, etc)

[James · Accepted solution]

 @kateyalee  

You should look at whether everyone will be enrolling at the same time vs open enrollment and whether there are any due dates.

If it's all at the same time (like a semester-based course), then you can have a single course with multiple sections to make it easier for faculty to manage. If it is a proceed at your own pace without due dates then it could work as a single course. You could put people into sections to act as cohorts to make management easier.

If it is offered at different times and there are due dates for things, then different courses is probably the better way to do things. You should not keep a course open for years and just keep adding sections, you have to use differentiated assignments and then it becomes messy.

Others have taken large, open-enrollment courses and tried to make them work with a single course, but there is no rolling due-dates in Canvas where something is due 5 days after you start the course. Having a single course makes analytics easier, but makes things slower since there is more data to load (roster, gradebook, etc)

[kateyalee]

Thanks James!  The courses are open for approximately 2 weeks (set start and end dates) and its a combination of Discussion Boards and Assignments.  With no specific due dates for the individual assignments or posts, just a progress at your own pace but having an end date for the entire course.  I'm leaning towards one course with sections since it's such a limited time frame.  Do you think this would suffice?

[James · Accepted solution]

I would go with separate courses if there are discussions where you want others to interact with each other. 

If it was a single course, then all of the discussions from the first cohort would be there when the third cohort comes along. That means that students from the third group would be trying to communicate with those from the first and second groups and not getting any responses.

There is the ability to restrict students to only see others in the same section, but that doesn't apply to sections. How do I limit a user to only interact with other users in the same course section?  

One thing you can do is to create multiple copies of the discussions, one for each cohort. If you have three discussions in the course, then you would need to create three for each section and then go in and change who they are assigned to.

I'm leaning towards different courses. You can have a master course that you copy from to create a new one every two weeks and it's going to be easier to change / update than keeping one rolling course open. The smaller courses also help with the speed of things within the course and it allows you to update things as time goes on.

Hopefully some other people will chime in with their experiences. We don't have anything that large, so I'm speaking from a theoretical perspective about the differences between courses and sections.

[kas433]

Hi James,

In your reply to Katey, you said "You should not keep a course open for years and just keep adding sections, you have to use differentiated assignments and then it becomes messy."

Can you briefly explain the pros and cons of adding sections to an existing course vs. creating a new course each term? Or direct me to a resource about it?

[James]

 @kas433  

You will have to ask someone else for pros of adding sections to an existing course, I can only think of cons for a traditional course with assessments and due dates.

There are two exceptions for us and neither one is a traditional course.

One is our student resources course that everyone has access to, but it has no assignments and no due dates. In that course, we do create sections so we can quickly contact students who are enrolled during a certain semester. The students start off in a student orientation course with assignments but no due dates and then we move them to the student resources course once they have completed the orientation. It is a duplicate course but without the assessments.

The other is our faculty training course that all faculty have access to. They do have assignments, but it also serves as a resource for them to come back to after they've completed the training. We just leave them in the single course rather than maintaining two of them for the faculty.