[Modules] Hiding and Viewing Modules for Individual Sections

[GideonWilliams]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas LMS

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Parts of this have been mentioned in previous requests (Modules within Modules and others) and I wonder if this is more to do with the needs of K12 than beyond?

We run a model based on UK curriculum which may be different to other school models (10+ subjects in a timetable, classes selected by ability, external examinations in 2/3 year groups, different content taught depending on the class etc). Having begun our implementation of Canvas the last thing we wished to do is create individual courses for each class and teacher in a subject. With up to 9 classes in a subject this would be an administrative nightmare and would go against much of what I believe a VLE is for - forward facing, collaborative, personalised, sharing of resources etc.

The reality is at school level it is very very difficult to create a core course that is truly personalised without some form of conditions/restrictions especially as "content is king". We add our classes as separate sections which enables assignments to be posted to individual classes. We would dearly like Canvas to go further and enable this option for other content such as pages/links etc.

The idea being suggested though is for teachers to be able to hide/view modules for individual sections

This would allow content (pages, links etc) to be viewed by individual sections. It would give teachers and students the best of both worlds. Modules could be 'turned on' for all sections or individual sections. It would allow you to create differentiated blocks of content/resources eg for those students who are perhaps sitting the 'Higher Level' exam. It would also allow us to support subjects where they have banded/set ability groups. It would also support subjects where topics are done on rotation due to resourcing. It would also reduce the risk of common core subjects such as Maths/Science developing vast 'silos' of resources/modules and making navigation harder than it should be. Would it also be less messy than Conditional activities?

I know that some suggestions have talked about creating extra courses but with the majority of our students having up to 15 courses to manage, the last thing I wish to see is doubling up courses and reducing engagement.

I think this is more of a K12 issue and it would be nice to see a little bit of love sent their way...

UPDATE: APRIL 2018

I was at the Dutch Users Group consortium on Friday. This consortium represents a sizeable and growing number of universities, colleges and schools within the Netherlands. As a group, we identified a number of ideas we wished to take forward and the one above emerged as a clear favourite (without any prompting from me!)

This is now an idea that has support across multiple educational organisations and the benefits of this idea are seen as hugely positive and wide ranging.

As the last comment on this was 16 months ago and 2 years since the idea was published, it would be nice to know what progress, if any, has been made here.

[kmeeusen]

Susan:

I was just reading that note, and could not tell if it included conditional access to Modules. From my perspective, that would be ideal because aI could create modules with content specific to a learner pathway. It would be a much more effective way to design courses for me.

KLM

[rileyke]

I was initially searching for this feature as a part of a PD course I am designing for K-5 teachers on how to implement Canvas in their classrooms. I teach many different PD courses, and may or may not want each course to see the same modules. It would be awesome if I could keep adding sections to my single PD course and publish/unpublish (hide/show, what have you) each module for each section.

This would also be very beneficial to my K-5 art, music, and PE teachers who have multiple sections per grade level. Each section may be working on different content at a different time. Teachers may want to release a module to their Monday class before their Tuesday class, for instance.

[GideonWilliams]

Thanks for taking the time to comment. Agree with all that you say and hope that this idea develops more. Can only be good for teaching and learning if we are sharing resources in one course but why not allow more flexibility for teachers and make things easier for students AT THE SAME TIME!!

[Renee_Carney]

This idea has moved to the next stage and will be open for voting among the Canvas Community, from Wed. June 1, 2016 - Wed. September 7, 2016.

Check out this doc for additional details about how the voting process works!

[repler]

I completely agree!  I was just coming in to make this suggestion myself.  We are a 100% online model and we place honors and standard students in the same course, but differentiate the curriculum slightly for honors students.  I'd like to have a module only be available to students in the honors sections.  We also allow students to only take segment 1 or segment 2 of the course and we place them in a section accordingly.  Currently, I don't have a way of differentiating what segment of students can view what without going into each individual assignment.  This feature would be a life saver!

[GideonWilliams]

Thanks for your comment and support Rachel - please pass on to others! Fully believe it is the way forward and one that allows both students and staff the best of all worlds. The ability to share additional digital resources with section or individual is key to developing a more personalised learning platform. We are slowly getting there.... :O)

[blake-whitten]

Hi!

This capability is ESSENTIAL for effective quizzing in the large-lecture Statistics courses that I teach at the University of Iowa, where, say, 600 enrolled students are concurrently enrolled in 20 different Discussion sections of 30 students each. (Students meet weekly with TAs in smaller Discussion sections, as well as attending large lectures with me.)

In Discussion, students take a weekly, hand-graded quiz. To promote academic integrity, I use multiple versions of each quiz and randomly assign different versions to different sections. To personalize student feedback and to avoid confusion, I prefer to "post quiz solutions (in the form of PDF files) by section" --- i.e., to reveal to each student ONLY the solution to his/her particular quiz version.

This implies the ability to "lock/unlock" or "hide/reveal" course content (i.e., modules) by section within a single Canvas course. Please support effective teaching and academic integrity within large courses by voting for (and implementing!) this capability for Fall 2016!

Sincerely,

Blake Whitten

University of Iowa

USA

[GideonWilliams]

Wow! I can see exactly why this is critical to you. Thanks so much for your support and engagement. For further comment, we need to get the total past 100 so perhaps you could persuade some colleagues to share their opinion too. Thanks for taking the time Blake.

[johnpj]

I agree, section-aware modules is a feature that would have a lot of value in large multi-section, higher-ed courses. In fact, we had to devise a workaround using differentiated assignments as a control gate for section-released modules in some of our universities course sites.

[johnpj]

There have been many past idea requests regarding this notion of releasing content to specific sections. This section-aware capability needs to be standard across all tools (as it is in almost all other learning management systems).