Crosslisting sections, Microsoft Teams classes, and FERPA

[asiegelman]

Hello all,

I am sure that we're not the only university with this issue, so wanted to post it to the Canvas community!

At this time, our university is not crosslisting sections of the same course taught by the same instructor. Our university is fairly small at the moment, but it is growing, and so we anticipate that requests for combining sections to mitigate duplicate work and potential inconsistencies across sections is going to increase.

We are also concerned, of course, about FERPA, and we do not want students enrolled in individual sections to be able to see one another. We know there are settings and steps to take within a Canvas course to ensure this. However, we use the Microsoft Teams classes LTI integration, and combining sections would result in one Teams class where the students would be able to see and interact with each other. Additionally, we'd prefer for each section to have their own separate Teams class anyway, as unfortunately there is history at the university of instructors teaching all of the sections synchronously at the same time, despite each section being scheduled at different times, and we want to mitigate that as much as possible.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there custom code that can be written to facilitate this on the back end? It's certainly frustrating for faculty members to have to manage multiple sections of the same course just because students will be able to see each other in Teams!

Thanks for reading!

[paul_fynn]

Our institution generates Teams sites at a relatively ad hoc point in time close to the trimester start.

Whether we get a single Teams channel for a crosslisted site, or two separate channels, is for us dependant on the timing of both the crosslisting and Teams channel generation. Before crosslisting we get separate Teams, after crosslisting we get a single combined Team.

Two observations

• Crosslisting and combined or seperate Teams Channels represent seperate predictable requirements that could be accommodated in a look up table and rule set such that Crosslisting and Teams creation are undertaken automatically at the point of provisioning according to 'predict and prepare' requirements
• Crosslisting in its current form is, in my view, not a very good solution and represents early and flawed thinking that we need to move beyond. Essentially crosslisting conflates cohorts and content, which could, and in my view shoud, be conceptualised seperately.
  • We have cohorts who are differentiated in our Student Information System but are taught in the same class and share the same Canvas site
    • I see no sense in having to create two separate Canvas sites when we know that these are going to be shut down and a third site created
    • The 'shut down and discard' approach means that we cannot start a crosslist after classes have started without losing student activity data
    • We know that we can continue to add further courses into an existing crosslist
  • I would much prefer to have a 'co-listing' approach to combining Canvas sites whereby we can opt to add a further section to an existing course directly. This would avoid losing data for late crosslisting, and the unnecessary creation of redundant 'child' sites

On that basis this would be addressed in the interface between Canvas and the Sutdent Information System - operationally this might require an academic or admin facing dashboard to capture Canvas and Teams requirements