[Sections] Edit Section: Restricting students to see own section only

[pdove]

When enrolling students to a course section, there is a small box for you to check to restrict the student to seeing only his/her own section and responses from other students only from his/her section.  If you miss checking this box upon enrollment, the only way to enable the feature is to go into each individual student's profile and make the change.  This should be an option on the "edit section" page.

Comments from Instructure

Sometimes, with the volume of ideas we have coming in, we miss a duplicate.  This idea has a duplicate with Course-Level Setting: Restrict Users to Their Own Section(s).  Both threads will receive the same updates.

[jared]

Hi guys, thanks for this in-depth discussion. The Community dialogue reflects my own experience discussing the ins-and-outs of this feature -- and larger issues around large courses and cross-listing.

A couple of things:

1. Re. Discussions, I think instead of simply hiding students in one section from another, you'd really have to look at separating sections into distinct Discussions -- you can imagine a single thread with multiple section conversations oblivious to the others will be problematic for the instructor. The core workflow of Group Discussion Assignments seems like the best user experience so far, so we'll likely think about this as section-differentiated Discussions, or more easily facilitating Groups from sections.

2. Thank you  @erlend_thune for the detailed test cases. I'll share this internally as we look at this issue further.

[erlend_thune]

Thank you both for your replies  @arovner ​ and Jared Stein. Yes, I guess one should keep sections separate as long as the students are able to click on students names in other sections and send messages to them that end up in the void. We do use group discussions most of the time. The problem is that we have one course where some of the discussions are optional. To be sure there would be enough posts to make it interesting, the instructors created these discussions as "global" discussions.

But there seems to be a lot of scenarios where you can get into trouble if you use restricted sections? I tested an announcement now with the TC4 configuration above (everyone restricted to their own section). If you have comments turned on and student A replies to the announcement, student B in another section will be able to click on student A's name and send her a message that will be discarded by the system.

At the moment I think it will be safest not to use section restriction.

We originally wanted to use sections so that the teacher would only see her own student when using Speedgrader.

[arovner]

 @erlend_thune ​ I have gotten most of my info re: how this might work from a great document from Seattle U - it's focused on protecting students under FERPA but I think you will find some helpful information in it.  It's called Canvas Guide: Complying with FERPA in Merged Courses and was shared by  @anthonem ​ (thanks again Mark!) in the FERPA requirement discussions.

Best,

Amy

[anthonem]

You're welcome  @arovner ​ - glad to hear this doc is helpful for you.

[jpm10]

Would be nice to restrict content access (files or modules) to sections.

[RobDitto]

 @jpm10 ​, agreed! It would be great for you to vote on, and join in the discussion, of these two ideas if you haven't already:

• " modifiedtitle="true" title="Make Files Visible to Certain Sections Only (the discussion there touches on MasteryPaths​, although I think of that as a twist on the current workaround technique of linking restricted files​ from assignments differentiated to a section​)

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Here we are at the beginning of the semester, still having to individually change the setting for hundreds of students. 

I suppose this won't happen in the next update?  I wish.

At least for summer session, or short term courses this semester.... please!

[cward]

We've filed a ticket with the engineering team on this issue, and hope to have a solution out by fall start! Unfortunately, behind the scenes this is harder to do that one would imagine...

Chris

[Renee_Carney]

Please take a look at the SIS Import Format Documentation  section of the Canvas Beta Release Notes (2017-03-20).  Adding an end date to courses that you would like move to 'past enrollments' might help with this idea.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Thanks Renee, that is a real step forward!

It's not the best possible solution though, since our SIS import is not aware of which courses are cross-listed, and which of those require separation of sections.  That would still need editing of each upload, and not sure how it would work for us.  Does anyone have a plan  for handling this situation?  Perhaps there's some way to create a list of sections requiring separation that can be used to automatically set this new limit_section_privileges field to true.

Nancy