Course Shells or Section Shells?

[agarciatms]

Hello,

I'm a new Canvas administrator and am looking to improve how our school has historically utilized the LMS. Currently, Grades 6 through 12 are using the Canvas LMS.

At the moment, we create course shells and then teachers invite students to their course. Teachers then create sections within their course and then assign students to their section. One big "complaint" is the Grades page not organizing well regarding ordering when it comes to multiple due dates/sections. 

Ultimately, I'm curious if there are any K-12 institutions that are using Canvas and if there is a strong benefit/opinion on organizing Courses as course shells with sections within them or each shell being its own section in a course.

Thanks in advance,
Alex

[Hildi_Pardo · Accepted solution]

We have our course creation and enrollments automated.  The way we have it set up is (copying and pasting below a description from one of our internal documents): 

• For every course you are assigned in Synergy (with student enrollments) a Canvas course is created with sections (periods) and enrollments. Do not manually add students to courses - if you have a new student, please allow 24 hours for the sync between Synergy and Canvas.
• Multiple Sections (periods) in one Course: 
• If you teach more than one section of a course, all those sections/periods will be enrolled in one course.  Teachers can leverage Sections for differentiating assignments, due dates, announcements, and filtering the gradebook.
• If you teach more than one subject, there will be a Canvas course for each subject. Example: If you teach 2 sections of Geometry and 3 sections of Algebra, you will have one Canvas course for Geometry (with two sections) and another for Algebra (with three sections).

If they are teaching the same content, teachers find it to be less work to maintain ONE course for the two or three sections -- it is a lot more work to try manage the content in two or three courses.    They can still differentiate assignments and due dates, but don't have try and make sure the content is in all two or three courses.  I hope this helps 😉

[agarciatms]

Thanks Hildi! This helps a lot. Out of curiosity, do your teachers struggle with organization within their Grades page or do you think they utilize filters well enough that they don't have issues managing multiple sections?

[Hildi_Pardo]

It totally depends on the teacher and how familiar they are, but yes, the Filters really help with viewing only one Section at a time, if needed.

[nwilson7]

@agarciatms I currently work at a University but came from K-12.  We did something similar to Hildi but every period was its own course.  We then allowed faculty to cross-list IF they wanted to combine their periods.  So most faculty had 7 courses each semester unless they chose to combine them through cross-listing.  This kept each course gradebook unique.

Hope this helps!

-Nick

[agarciatms]

Thank you for this information! I was not aware of cross-listing as a feature. This looks like it would resolve that particular issue. I will definitely present this as an option to our chairs. 

[Hildi_Pardo]

We have the crosslisting automated at the start as courses are created.  This saves teachers a lot of time.  And, as this is a process that usually only needs to be done at the start of the school year, it's often something that they don't remember how to do each year -- the amount of training and support and communication needed to show them how to crosslist is a lot more work 😉