Add Option to Hide Old Groups From Dropdown

[ginan]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

  Idea will be open for vote May 5th, 2015 - August 5th, 2015  Learn more about voting...

Please give students the ability to hide past course groups from their "Courses & Groups" dropdown. After a while, this becomes cluttered with old groups from courses they are no longer taking.

  Comments from Instructure...

Greetings all!  We often remind the Community that even archived ideas can become a real feature, and this one is proof of that!

Please take a look at the Canvas Production Release Notes (2015-09-19)

Conclude Groups at Course Conclusion

When a course concludes in Canvas, groups in the course also conclude. Concluded groups do not appear in the Courses & Groups menu. Users can still access their previous and current groups in the Groups page.

[scottdennis]

Hey Robbie,

Is the instructor still able to visit the groups via the People area in the course or are they shut out there as well?

[RobDitto]

Teachers are shut out of viewing groups in concluded courses, either via the Groups tab or on individual students' Profile pages. Interestingly, teachers get the New Student Groups Page, including search within groups, in a concluded course -- but with the Visit links removed.  I share  @Robbie_Grant ​'s concern that the feature idea wasn't envisioned with limiting teacher access in mind and hope that it could be revisited.

Oddly enough, if the New Student Groups Page view could be provided to teachers all the time, it would fulfill the idea -- albeit with a performance hit, as the lazy load of New Student Groups Page is extremely slow compared to the current-course teacher view (a.k.a "Groups Redesign", which lacks group-member search).

[scottdennis]

Hey  @RobDitto ​ and  @Robbie_Grant ​,

I was able to determine that the recent change to conclude groups at course conclusion was not intended to affect Teacher access to groups associated with concluded courses.  Please file support tickets for where you have specific examples of this so we can get the steps to reproduce documented.

Thanks,

SD

[RobDitto]

 @scottdennis , I've just submitted a case.  Thanks for suggesting that and for researching whether blocking teachers was intended.

(Update: Support is saying blocking teachers is intended...)

[Renee_Carney]

Thank you to  @ginan  for submitting this idea, as well as,  @rpetrina ,  @SethBattis , hewsimons, and  @thmjesso  for your contributions. Your investment in this idea helped refine a feature which is now part of the Canvas!

[belloa4b]

The feature still does not allow old groups to be removed with their respective course.

[scottdennis]

Hi Travis,

Do you mean that this feature is not retroactive in that the groups associated with courses that were concluded in the past are not retroactively hidden?

Thanks,

Scott

[belloa4b]

Scott,

That may be the issue because the groups associated with passed courses I have completed still show up even though I have the classes hidden.

Sincerely,

Travis Bellows

[scottdennis]

Right.  I don't know for sure, but I would guess that the change does not retroactively hide groups for courses that were concluded in the past but only for courses that are concluded going forward.  Sorry about that.

[RobDitto]

 @belloa4b ​, did you have to manually remove the past course by customizing your Course list? Or did that past course containing groups conclude automatically?

At our institution, group concludes have been working retrospectively for automatically-concluded courses; it's possible that behavior relates to how our term dates are configured (with explicit "Students can access from/to" dates in each term).