[Discussions] Granular section permission for posting discussions

[dsweeney2]

When a user is enrolled in a course and their enrollment is limited to a section they should not have the option to add a discussion for 'All sections'. Instead they should be presented with a default option of 'All my sections' and then the post should only be visible to users in the relevant sections.

We are trying to set up a peer mentoring course and want to limit enrollment so that the mentors can only interact with their allocated mentees, however the current functionality has meant that we won't be proceeding with this solution at this stage as the likelihood that a student mentor will ignore our advice and just post a discussion to 'All sections' is very high.

[Stef_retired]

@dsweeney2 Thanks for sharing this idea. The standard course-level roles are detailed in What user roles and permissions are available in C... - Canvas Community Could you specify which standard role corresponds to "user in a staff role" in this context?

[dsweeney2]

Thanks @Stef_retired , The roles I tested were Designer and TA.

[Stef_retired]

@dsweeney2 Since users aren't customarily enrolled in courses in the Designer role to facilitate course activities such as discussions, I suggest we move this forward as a request for a new permission specific to the TA role. Does that sound like a good plan?

[dsweeney2]

Thanks @Stef_retired, My feeling is that this is a bug and should apply to all roles, including instructors. The roles I checked are the ones that I was hoping could be used for this purpose as we wanted to use a lower-privileged role as the base. However, if an enrollment is limited to a section then that privilege restriction should also apply to discussions in my opinion.

[Stef_retired]

@dsweeney2 Thanks. I've edited the idea to make it as all-encompassing as possible and have moved it forward for broader discussion.

[DanBurgess]

In the particular use case @dsweeney2  has mentioned, couldn't course groups be used? The discussions posted to a course group should only be viewable by the group. Using  course groups does not restrict the mentors from posting a discussion to the entire course which I think speaks to the need for having a permission option that could be set. 

If this feature request were to be implemented, I would hope the default would be the existing behavior (can post discussions to the entire course) with the option to restrict this.

[dsweeney2]

Thanks @DanBurgess, Groups would be difficult for us to implement in this instance. These courses (~70 of them) will have hundreds of mentors and thousands of mentees. We have an existing integration for sections from our timetable system that will keep the membership of these sections up to date. Maintaining a parallel group structure would be unworkable.

We also have regular courses with dozens of tutors all limited in their enrollment to their specific tutorial section(s). They have been limited so as to only interact with the students they have charge of. Given we've made this deliberate choice it makes sense to me to have the default behaviour reflect that restriction.

Would 'All my sections' as a default and 'All sections' as an option be workable?

[Alba_UFV]

Good morning, in our institution we are encountering the same problem.
We have in the courses the students distributed in sections with communication restriction between sections. The forums are created by sections, and although everything is correctly created, students can see the answers of other students who are in another section with which they should not communicate.
In addition to what @dsweeney2 comments, that the teacher although has limited permission to communicate with other students in other sections has the ability to publish the forum for "All sections".

Can you fix it Instructure? How can we move forward with this issue?
Thank you very much
Best regards