More section control for group creation

[peter_kupfer]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For additional information, please read through Canvas Production Release Notes (2016-12-10).

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When creating groups with the option to "Split Students into X Groups" that should also have an option to restrict to same section.

Also, when viewing the groups and who is not in a group. There should be a filter by section option.

[RobDitto]

Voted! Since splitting students into groups is a form of random assignment, I believe this is similar to the old community's Option to Create Randomly-Assigned, Within-Section Groups.  That old feature discussion was of interest to mg2695,  @bbrown , Deactivated user, hallmans and others.

Our institution has some specific needs which seem to fit into this idea, but I wonder whether they actually need separate feature ideas. 

• Does this feature idea apply to self-signup?  We'd like filtering by section to apply to students signing up for groups in a course.  Teachers here would like to enforce that, say,  Groups 1-10 are for students in Section 1 only, and Groups 11-20 are for students in Section 2 only.
• Might this feature idea apply to combining subsets of sections for filtering/splitting?  Sometimes we need subsets of groups in a set/category/tab to apply to some, but not all, sections -- e.g., Groups 1-20 are for students in Sections 1 and 2, but Groups 21-30 are for Section 3 students only.  This use case is needed both for random assignment and self-signup.

[woodsdm2]

Another useful option with group assignment would be to create some groups manually, and then randomly assign the remaining students.

I find that I usually have a mix - some students want to form their own groups and others don't care.  So I end up creating all of the groups manually.  First I create the groups that have organized themselves and then use an external tool to randomize the remaining students.

[RobDitto]

In your use case, would the random assignment at the end of group formation need to be within sections?

[woodsdm2]

No - I don't make use of sections so all group assignments are from all students in the course.

[RobDitto]

Good to know, thanks. In keeping with the How to write a good feature idea submission guidelines, randomly assigning "laggards" who don't self-signup may need its own feature idea.

[johnpj]

This may be implicit in your idea, but it is very useful to be able have a groups that includes all students in a section. We actually created an API script to do this in our instance of Canvas.

[orwinr]

If it isn't implicit, I would vote for the ability to add individuals to a group based on sections. We use Canvas for a number of student community sites with a number of sections and currently have to manually add and remove students from the groups that are created for each section. It would be awesome if I could create the group set and have an option that says: "Automatically create a  group for each section" and have it create a group for each section and enroll all of the students in their individual sections.

John, would you be willing to share your API script? I would be very interested in taking a look.

[johnpj]

To  Create Groups Based on Sections

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $serverName  = "https://myserver.instructure.com";

#

# Create 63 groups "Section 007" .. "Section 069" in group category id #70

#

my $groupPrefix   = "Section ";

my $firstGroupNum = 7;

my $lastGroupNum  = 69;

my $groupCatId = 70;

my $token = "user-generate-token";

my $curlTemplate = "curl  -H 'Authorization: Bearer $token' $serverName/api/v1/group_categories/$groupCatId/groups -F 'is_public=false' -F 'join_level=invitation_only' -F 'name=$groupPrefix%03d' -F 'description=Section %03d'";

for ( my $i=$firstGroupNum; $i<=$lastGroupNum; $i++ )

{

    my $curlString = sprintf($curlTemplate,$i, $i);

    `$curlString`;

}

To add Users to Groups

my $baseGroupId = 109;

my $serverName    = "https://myserver.instructure.com";

my $token = "user-generate-token";

my $curlTemplate ="curl -H 'Authorization: Bearer $token' $serverName/api/v1/groups/%d/invite -F 'invitees[]=%s'";

my $filename =  $ARGV[0];

# Read file

open FILE, $filename or die "$!";

my @lines = <FILE>;

close FILE;

# Read in CSV file (group,user) and add users to each group

# This assumes groups were created sequentially

foreach (@lines)

{

    chomp;

    my @userGroup = split /,/;

    my $curlString = sprintf($curlTemplate,$baseGroupId+$userGroup[1],$userGroup[0]);

    `$curlString`;

}

# Developed by Beth Kirschner

[orwinr]

Thanks John! I will tinker with the script and see if I can get it to work!

[jordan]

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