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There are some assignments that go out to the majority of my students except one or two per class. It would be great to be able to assign to "everyone" and then have a button to select which students are exempt from the assignment.
As an instructor, the ability to assign a quiz or assignment to a whole class with the exception of a few students would be very helpful. As far as I am aware, right now if you want to assign to the whole class except for one student, you would have to type in each individual name of the students in your class. Having this feature would greatly help in fulfilling accommodations.
I'd like to have the option to block students from taking quizzes/exams remotely. Not every student, but those who are not attending. Moderate a quiz/exam/assignment for certain students not to have access.
It looks like for quite a few years, people have been asking Canvas to improve access for students with disabilities by giving teachers the ability to exclude students from an assignment that is not suitable for them (and then assigning a modified version only to specific students- a feature that does exist in Canvas). I'm hoping that I'm missing something. It appears that the only way we can do this is by individually assigning it to everyone else, and clearly, for teachers with multiple classes and large numbers of students, this is inconceivable. Please prioritize adding this feature or lead me to guidance if it is (I hope) already available.
I am surprised this is not an option already. I have two sections of students in my Canvas course. One group are completely online students and the others are the face-to-face students. I can assign different test by selecting one section vs another. As students in my face-to-face section go into quarantine I can easily assign them the virtual quizzes and exams. However, I need to be able to exclude them from the in person quizzes and exams. Otherwise, their gradebook looks like they have to do the assignment twice. I know that I can go in and excuse them from the in-person quiz/test as a work around. But, this seems like it would be an easy thing for the Canvas developers to add that would help immensely at this time. Thank you for reading.
I have 120 students in a class, and wish to exclude 1 student from accessing the quiz on canvas. It seems the only way to do this is to type in 119 student names?
This would be really valuable, as we try to accommodate students more carefully in the stress of the pandemic. However, without it, might we at least be able to copy-paste names of students to assign them, rather than having to type every student in individually? That would avoid a lot of the hassle. Last week I discovered that I had missed one of my other students when assigning manually to everyone except my handful of kids who need special accommodations right now.
Here are a couple of suggestions. None is perfect, but you have to weigh it against the alternative of entering 119 students and possible missing some.
Excuse the student
You can go into the gradebook and type EX and hit enter. This will become Excused in the gradebook. Do this for the student(s) you don't want to take an assignment.
Now the question is ... what does the student experience?
It still shows up on the student's To Do list ...
... but when they go to take it, they can't.
There is no "Take the Quiz" button for them.
On the other hand, this is what each of the 119 students would see.
I tried to mitigate the issue by warning the student in the instructions, but that's probably going to confuse the 119 more than it helps the 1.
Excusing works the same way with other types of assignments. The students can see that there is an assignment, but they cannot submit anything.
The benefit of the excused assignment over the second proposal is that in the Gradebook, the excused grade will show up as an EX, so you could teach the students what that means.
Differentiated Assignments
If you're okay with a moderate level of hiding something from a student, then you can assign it to just that student using differentiated assignments (using more than one assign to boxes at the bottom of the assignment). Do not put a due date on it so it doesn't show up on their To Do list or calendar and put an "Available Until" date in the past so they cannot take it.
It won't show up on the To Do list, but if the student finds it under Assignments or Grades, then the student will not get a "Take the Quiz" button because the quiz is in the past. They will get a "This quiz was locked Feb 22 at 11:59 pm" message instead.
Notes about the first two situations
With either of these methods, adding instructions to the quiz or assignment itself about what is going on is probably not the best way to convey what is happening. However, some communication needs to happen with the students until they are clear on what is happening. For example, you could leave a submission comment that explains that they have been excused from this assignment, it will not count against them, and they can click the X on the To Do list to remove it.
That last part of course depends on the route you take. I would save that blurb somewhere and then copy/paste it in for each student who does not need to take the assignment.
MasteryPaths This one is questionable whether it will help, but it would hide it from the student. It's a lot of overhead, but I mention it just in case someone can imagine a way to make it work. I have only used mastery paths a couple of times and it wasn't for this purpose, so if what I say is incorrect, I apologize ahead of time.
Let's say that the students are those who showed up in class are given one set of assignments and those who didn't show up were given a different set of assignments (similar to what @LDMathews was saying). You could have an assignment that decides what path students will take. Make sure that doesn't count towards the final grade. For all of those who are in class, give them one score and for those who are not in class, give them a different score. When you set up the mastery paths, add the proper assignments based on the scoring.
MasteryPath items need added to the modules page, and would want to make sure that students could not work on the assignment until the mastery path was determined. That could mean enforcing sequential progress through the module or making the "Available from" date late enough that you have enough time to assign a grade for the conditional assignment.
For more information about MasteryPaths, see the Modules section within the Canvas Instructor Guide.
This is a lot of work for one or two students who need excluded from an assignment and I'm not recommending it for that situation. If you were to use it for one or two students, then I would go into the gradebook and assign the grade for those students and then use the Set Default Grade to assign the rest of the class.
Overall, it seems like Excused might be the best approach to take.
(I think this may solve the issue we have with trying to differentiate for OCS. I believe this will allow it to still sync with PS?? but instead of us typing in 22 names every time just to keep 3 OCS kids from seeing it, then we can simply select "everyone" but then deselect our 3 OCS kids. For our OCS assignment, we can still just assign to those 3 kids. It isn't perfect but it is better than what we currently have without having to set up a new section in PS.) -If they suggest using Groups that isn't good because it allows students to share files, etc. which we don't want! Ideally, I would like to be able to subdivide my class for assignments the way we were trying to do under Sections, but if that isn't possible, then I think this is a good compromise.
