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 

[kas200]

A very good point, if you want to use sections.  

But when you want the features of student groups, you're stuck with the manual addition of users. https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/9304-batch-group-management would be a great tool to have!

[de_millington]

As an addendum to wanting students to interact with each other, you may achieve this in sections as well as with Groups.

[maguire]

I should point out the work by  @tyler_clair  to automatically create groups from sections - see Sections to Groups Script .

When you have a large number of students and have already put them into sections, being able to automatically create the groups would seem to be the way to go (rather than using the UI to drag each student into a group). 

However, in keeping with the question about filtering by group - and knowing it is easy to filter the gradebook view by section - the obvious solution is to create sections from groups, hence I wrote a python program to do this. Further details and the source code are available at Fun with Groups and Sections: Chip sandbox .

[awarmar]

We also have to remember that not all institutions allow for the manual creation of sections for various reasons noted throughout the comments on this idea. For those people, there isn't a workaround to the sorting by student groups issue, no matter how great and/or easy to use the code is (but for those who can create sections, thanks for linking to the code!) 

[laurakgibbs]

Just a quick note about sections,  @awarmar ‌: when I needed to re-enroll a student in a class who was making up an incomplete, Kevin Buck had me enroll her in a separate section, which worked out great. That's not related to the groups problem you are facing, but it sure was handy to be able to have her "in" the class while also being in a separate section as she finished the incomplete from the previous semester.

[awarmar]

Hey Laura  I know we have the ability to create sections (and have helped many large section instructors create them in order to accomplish the workarounds)--but there are many people at other institutions who can't, so for them (and in the interest of keeping things simple for our users), this feature request needs to stay on Canvas's radar. 

[laurakgibbs]

I voted up 🙂

[g_r_saward]

We are just going around this loop as a relatively new adopter in the UK.  The discussion of groups vs sections is a key issue for managing projects and dissertations and I was interested to find:

• Groups: variously defined as:
  • “for study or communication (but not grading)” or
    “for the purpose of projects, assignments, and grading” … by providing “context for many other types of functionality and interaction, such as collections, discussions, wikis, and shared files.” - Canvas document on Groups API
• Sections: described as:
  • a way to “help subdivide students within a course and offer section-specific options such as varied due dates for assignments, discussions, and quizzes.” - Canvas Guide on How do I add a section ...?
  • a "collection of student enrollments in a division of a course that meets at the same time (or is ) and is taught by the same person” - Canvas Admins documentation on ... course organizational structures

There is lots of common functionality between groups and sections (e.g. messaging and announcements) and other areas are unclear at the moment (e.g. appointment scheduling and calendars) but the management of marking - this feature / topic - appears a key decider.

Our institution is working on an in-house marker allocation workflow, but in the meantime where do people think Canvas is going in using groups vs sections?

[maguire]

 @g_r_saward  , In my view sections are a way of viewing a set of students who are being graded or closely supervised by an examiner or adviser, while a group is a more tightly communicating set of students and possibly faculty. These groups may be pursuing completely independent topics and may even for reasons of confidentiality during the project want to keep their communication only within the group.

In both courses that I have helped set up for 1st and 2nd cycle degree projects, sections are used for:

1. Every student is in a section based upon their examiner

2. Every student is in a section based upon their adviser(s)

These two enable a given faculty member to have an overview of the students that they are responsible for by selecting their section to view in the gradebook.

3. There is a section for students in each program of studies (as we have many different programs that all have a requirement for a degree project, but rather than having a large number of different degree project courses in Canvas we can organize them into a single course per level (and per school within the university).

This enables the person responsible for a program to get an overview of what the status is of the students that they are responsible for.

4. A section for each year - containing the students who completed their degree project in that year.

This enables easy review by management and external quality reviewers (for example, in our upcoming national evaluations we will also be evaluated based upon the quality control processes that are to have been applied). 

5. As all of this is in the context of a Canvas course (for each respective level).

This enables the person responsible for all degree projects and the persons responsible for education within the school to have an overview of all of the degree projects within the school.

6. Each student can see their status with regard the overall process, along with their submissions of drafts, feedback upon those drafts, and completion of parts of their degree project via the gradebook.

Ideally with the use of rubrics it should be possible to better understand the student's progress toward demonstrating all of the required learning objects for the degree project course. [Note that this understanding is relevant both for the student themselves and the relevant faculty, administrators, and external evaluators.]

In a course on research methodology and scientific writing, I have divided the students into sections and each section has a faculty member who is the adviser for this set of students. The students further divide themselves into groups of two students, so that they can jointly submit presentations, drafts of reports, etc. Additionally, other students are individually assigned as peer reviewers for other groups' submissions (for some of each group's submissions) and as formal opponents for the final oral presentations. Each of the sections has it own meeting times with their adviser and their own schedule for final oral presentations. The entire class only meets for the first day of class. All of the traditional lectures for this course have been turned into assignments with one or more videos and a quiz. I have found that by assigning students to sections based upon their program of study and their research interests (and the subject area of the faculty member assigned to this section) that (1) many (not all) of the problems about scheduling a course for students from so many different programs go away, (2) students find that they have knowledgeable peers and advising,  (3) that it is feasible for every group to be working on a small research project that is different from that of any other group taking the course, and (4) I have shifted the hours I spend from lectures to large groups to advising sessions with individual groups or even individual students. [For the last several years this has been from 15:00 to 19:00 every Monday and with extra time at the start of the term.]

In another project course we have found that sections were the way around the limitation that each person can only be in a single group in a given group set. This made it difficulty to have a teaching assistant (or faculty member) be a member of multiple groups.

I should note that the use of Canvas for 1st and 2nd cycle degree projects has been running only since January and only used for ~40% of the school. I will give a presentation about it to all of the teachers in the school on the 22nd and we will see whether it expands to the whole school. One of the elements that I have worked with this past year and the topic of a 1st cycle thesis by two student (Connecting Silos : Automation system for thesis processing in Canvas and DiVA ) is how to connect Canvas with both the university's content management system (CMS) (which provides calendar events for the student's oral presentations) and with the university's digital archiving system where all of the meta data about each thesis and each this must be archived. Addition, it the student gives their permission for the full text to be made available, the archiving system also makes the full text available. The manual efforts of entering the meta data, archiving, and optionally publishing theses was estimated  to take > 2.5 full-time employees worth of effort each year and the two students found that the accuracy rate of data being entered was quite low (in their random sample of 100 theses manually entered in 2017). The entry of calendar entries into the CMS was estimated to take nearly one full-time employee's effort each year. The effort required for the latter means that in practice I am the only examiner putting entries into the CMS calendar system, most of the examiners only send an announcement via a mailing list or via the Canvas course.

[laurakgibbs]

Wow, this is all so interesting! In U.S. schools, sections are an enrollment device, something very official and bureaucratic (for example, all fully  courses at my school are automatically given the section number 995: I teach a course in Modern Language, MLLL, which is course number 4993, which is really 499-3 (course 499 for 3 units of credit), section 995. There is no section 1, there is no section 994 ... it is section 995 because it is fully . The section number usually appears on students' official transcripts together with the course number, another sign that it is something very "official."

That's why I was amazed to find out that my school has configured Canvas so that I actually create a new section in my class (not all schools allow this of course, as Amanda pointed out above). I had always thought of sections as something that was just institutional recordkeeping, not a tool I could use my self. And it turned out to be very useful for the purpose that my Canvas admin recommended, which was for a student making up past work because she had become very ill the previous semester and had not been able to complete the course she was enrolled in. For the final grade, I submitted the grade for her course/section the previous semester; the "invented section" I used while she was making up her missed work meant nothing officially, but it sure was useful to me teaching the course.

Anyway, I wanted to thank everybody for this discussion. Not directly relevant to my classes, but it's very interesting to learn about the different needs that sections/groups might fill, and how people might choose between them.