[Groups] Select specific sections when creating groups

[KimberlyHopkins]

The new(ish) option to require students to be in the same section when assigning group members is great! However, there is one more feature that would make this incredibly useful (especially in large courses): selecting which sections to  use during this process.

At our institution, we often have large courses which contain both the lecture and lab or recitation sections. It is ideal for an instructor to maintain one course, but often groups and other activities need to be restricted to specific lab sections. As all students share a lecture section, the current feature will not allow for the generation of lab specific groups.

Allowing instructors to say "out of these groups, make sure they share sections" or (possibly a little more clean), "ignore these section enrollments" would be extremely helpful. Group setup is not always a one time thing, and an instructor may even want to create a group set exclusively out of one lab section, for instance to randomly assign lab partners.

The size of these courses really makes manually assigning these groups a burden for instructors, and that also removes the ability to assign them randomly.

Ideally, instructors would be able to choose as many or as few of the sections as they want to build the group set with, and then also specify whether students must share a section to be in the same group within that set.

[RobDitto]

Voted! I interpreted your feature idea to apply to courses where students are enrolled in more than one section (within the same Canvas site). We could use this feature at our institution.

You may be interested in taking a look at a related idea about improving how groups and sections work together:

• https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/2549-create-groups-based-on-sections 

[KimberlyHopkins]

Thanks for the vote! 

Essentially, yes. We have a good number of courses set up to share one Canvas site between lecture and all the labs, so students are frequently not just in multiple sections, but they share one large section. Hence wanting the ability to choose which sections to care about when randomizing group enrollments.

[marja_fbvu]

Hi, good idea but I'm a bit confused about your talk about the new(ish) option. Do you mean it is already a new functionality released? Of do you mean an option still in voting or under construction? I checked our environment and I can't find this 😉

[KimberlyHopkins]

I'm not sure if this is optional or not, but in our instance of Canvas, if you select the split students into X groups option, a sub-option appears to require group members to be in the same section. It looks like this option was added in late January, so new is relative.

[RobDitto]

I'm hoping to find a way to associate this idea with the newly announced Priority: Teaching & Learning at Scale. That priority seemingly doesn't yet have a tag.  Those interested in this idea, please also consider voting on improving the SpeedGrader Showing filter for group assignments:

• https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/9916-speedgrader-needs-graded-count-by-section 

[marja_van_harli]

I finally have time to dig into our issue with groups and sections. What we do miss is the possibility to create a groupset to a specific section. For example: student A till K are enrolled in section 1, students L till Z in section 2. I want to create a groupset "groupset "  (where within I create groups) only related to section 1. If I want to assign the students to these groups only the students from section 1 can be assigned, either by themselves, either randomly, either by teacher. I can give the groups a limit on it. There will be no unassigned students from section 2 visible in groupset 1.

At the moment the option you can randomly assign students to a group with the same section gives you only the opportunity to create groups in a groupset as many as sections there have been created.

We have a course given by 3 teachers. The enrolments contain 100 students. But we have only lecture rooms who can contain 20 students, so the lecture will given 5 times. So we create 5 sections and enroll these students on one section each. Then the teacher decide that there will be small groups within these section who needs to collaborate. Therefor the teacher wants to create a groupset with 2 groups where only the students of his section can assign to. For example the group is created based on a theme. 

So instead of creating groups assigned to same section, I would like a functionality that you can create a groupset based on a specific section. Is this what you mean as well Kimberly?

[christophe_bree]

In our institution, a course is used by several teachers. Students are added via sections. A teacher is responsible for one or more sections.

When a teacher creates groups manually, he/she needs to see his/her students only. So we would like to filter the long list of students (500+) by section (10+). This way, the teacher can easily see which students haven't been added to a group yet.

[prebenh]

I also really need this feature. We have a main section of all students coming from the SIS, which means we are not able to use the automatically created groups 😞 when needed in the main section.

If this feature is chosen, the speedgrader should also be able to show only groups from each section. Very important when several instructors grade group assignments from different examination classes.

[lekern]

VOTED! When an instructor is asking Canvas to automatically create groups and restrict the members by section, it is desirable to be able to specify which sections to include. 

In our instance of Canvas, instructors of large courses have a large number of discussion sections, and 1 large lecture section in their courses. Students are enrolled in both the lecture section and in one of the discussion sections. Currently Canvas does not have a way to eliminate consideration of membership in the Lecture section, or a way to divide the members of a specific section into groups. Instructors of large classes have no option for how to create groups that restrict members to a specific section, and there is no easy way within Canvas to see the information needed in order to manually assign the groups.

[ole-ivar_birkel]

This is a great idea!

I would also like

- groups membership to be dependent on section membership post creation as students sometimes move between sections. Keeping group membership correct post creation can be a challenge in large courses when group membership has to match section membership.

- group naming following/from section name or SIS ID. We sometimes need Group Names to match section name/SIS ID. Naming groups post creation is time consuming in large group sets.

I did not find your idea, so I wrote up my own a few days ago https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/13048-functionality-for-group-set-created-from-sections