Filter Gradebook by Groups

[kas200]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

This is reviving quite a few suggestions, including Grades - Filter or Sort Students by Groups, Add "Groups" filtering feature to Assignments/Grading, and Gradebook Smart View by Group.

We need a way to filter the gradebook using student groups. Right now, the gradebook can only be filtered by sections within a course. There are quite a few use cases for requesting this functionality:

1. We have several large classes where the TAs are responsible for grading a subsection of a section within a course. This becomes tedious, because the filtering options for the gradebook limit this by section only. So if they have a section of 40 students but are only responsible for grading 20 of those, they need to create a section to filter the gradebook. This becomes troublesome when there are 400+ students in the course since creating sections requires the manual work of clicking on each student to change their associated sections. Even with section-anonymity turned on, this is still 60+ clicks for one subsection of 20 students.

2. We have several programs that use outside folks as facilitators who grade/interact with students. We set-up student groups for these folks so they can communicate with just their group of students. It would be nice to filter the gradebook of these groups instead of writing the facilitator's name in the Notes column or manually creating sections for the groups.

3. Some of our courses have several different groups in them for various purposes (different projects, in-class groups, etc). In general, it would be nice if instructors could filter off these groups to compare student performance and involvement.

As a final note, the drag-and-drop functionality of Groups is much easier to use than the manual process of creating sections. While manageable for small numbers, it's simply too much to handle for large courses.

This idea has been added to our product plan for Q2 2019 and will influence development within Canvas. Follow this idea to receive updates as they are available.

 :smileyinfo: Adding this idea to our product plan means we will be working on it, but it does not guarantee that it will be developed exactly as defined by the idea, or that it will be added to the production environment.

Read more about the feature idea process:

• Adaptation: Feature Idea Process Changes
• How does the feature idea process work in the Canvas Community?
• What is the feature development process for Canvas?

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Release Notes (2019-06-22)‌ & https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-17625 

[jinnette_seneca]

Really glad this has been implemented finally, BUT in practice - it still has a pretty significant limitation: within the Speedgrader view, you still cannot filter by student group (only sections). So, for a course leveraging the group tool to also divide facilitation/assessment tasks - it's really nothing more than a cosmetic gradebook view. This is extremely disappointing.

[sendres]

I agree,  @jinnette_seneca ‌, that this needs to be implemented at the group level, not just the section level. In higher ed, usually the professors create their own student groups (and sometimes different group sets for different assignments) whereas sections are created by the registrar.

More than 99% of our courses have one section of students in them, so I would argue this has not been implemented at all.

[maguire]

 @sendres   and  @jinnette_seneca  ,

Fortunately, one can automatically (via the API) make sections from groups - see https://kth.instructure.com/courses/11/files/1104250

and then you can use the section based filtering.

[sendres]

Hi  @maguire ‌,

From a technical perspective, yes, that is totally feasible. But from an institutional policy standpoint, enrollments in course sections are owned by our registrar in both the SIS and Canvas. I would be overstepping my boundaries by creating sections in Canvas separately from the SIS. I imagine the same would be true at most colleges and universities.

[maguire]

You need not disturb the existing administratively created sections, but rather add additional sections for each student. Within Canvas students can be in up to 18 different Canvas sections. Note that a Canvas section need not be equivalent to a SIS or other administrative concept of a section. I have used sections to provide different parties with the relevant view of the students in a course. For example, one course has students from multiple programs of study in it - by putting the students into sections based on their program of study the adviser for each program of study can easily see just the students in their program. Similarly, in this same course, there are multiple faculty advisers and each has a section - thus they can easily view just the set of students that they are advising. As one of these advisers, I am far happier to see the list of a dozen students that I am responsible for rather than the >300 students in the course.

[RobDitto]

 @jinnette_seneca  and  @sendres  a feature idea just opened for filtering-by-group in SpeedGrader equivalent to what's now in New Gradebook:

• Sort SpeedGrader by Group

[jinnette_seneca]

Thanks for sharing that! Now upvoted zealously!

[Renee_Carney]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas 

For more information, please read through the Canvas Release Notes (2019-06-22)‌ & Canvas Release Notes (2019-09-21) 

[a1051490]

I think what Steven is saying is that the ability to edit sections in Canvas has been disabled by admin at mine and many other institutions - so sections can only be created and edited in the SIS. Teachers can create and edit groups, but they are very limited in functionality. So the problem of being able to filter the gradebook by group is still alive and well for many of us.

[maguire]

When faced with the problem that working with sections was locally disabled for the teacher role, I sought to find out why. What I found was that it was turned off because the same permission that lets a user create/edit/delete sections also enables cross listing - and it is this latter that is the problem. See my posting https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/canvas-developers/blog/2019/06/12/createeditdelete-sections-a... 

As noted in this posting, I think that the failure to test if the user has the ability to manage students in the target course is a programming error and a security hole. I reported this to the Canvas security e-mail address and did not get a substantive reply.