[Groups] Group Sets and Late Enrollments

[llj26]

Problem statement:

Students who are added to a course after Group Sets have been created must be manually added to groups, even if groups were created automatically to start with. This can be a daunting task, especially in large classes. Previous solutions have included "just wait until add/drops are done" but this is 12 class days into the semester for our institution, and in fully online classes and many face to face collaborative classes, this is not a viable option.

Proposed solution:

Add a checkbox when creating groups initially that would include "auto-enroll students added to the course later based on these parameters" The system would then look at the parameters of the original group set (such as same-section settings), and add any new student accordingly.

User role(s):

admin

[downinge1]

Problem statement:

In a University setting, large courses with multiple sections are often taught with a faculty member per section and a course coordinator in charge of content updates and maintenance. To properly monitor the courses and keep them up-to-date, courses are crosslisted. When courses are crosslisted, students from different sections could potentially interact -- depending on the structure of the course, this could be a FERPA violation. To prevent this, groups can be made that have the "require group members to be in the same section" checkbox checked. Students are able to enroll or move between sections after the groups have been created due to the drop/add date in most University's systems being after classes have started. When these new students join, they aren't automatically added to any groups and have to be manually added or groups need to be remade. Because you can't know when or how many students will enroll, the solution is to simply not use groups until after the drop/add date has passed; this limits options in Canvas courses.

Proposed solution:

When creating a Group Set, "Require Group members to be in the same section" should either automatically add new enrollments to the appropriate group or another checkbox should be added titled "New enrollments automatically added to groups". The latter option would also solve an issue of new enrollments needing to be manually added, whether aligned with sections or not. This would allow University courses to use group sets immediately without additional maintenance. If set up properly, groups could even be set up and imported from one shell to another and automatically populate based on new enrollments. This would greatly reduce the amount of course setup required by faculty.

User role(s):

admin,instructor,student,designer