Hiding Inactive Sections in Assign Access

[jbarr]

I am experimenting with combining both semester's sections into a single, year-long Canvas course.

Our SIS names the sections according to the period rather than the semester, so the name of the sections, regardless of semester, is the same for both semesters. To get around this, I have added start and end dates for each section.

This arrangement is fine, until working in the Assign Access interface where both the active and inactive session show up. I have attached a screenshot below.

Is there a way to hide inactive sections in the Assign Access interface?

[dbrace · Accepted solution]

Hi @jbarr,

I applaud you for experimenting with combining sections from different semesters into the same year-long course shell. That should help instructors manage their course list.

It is not possible to mark a section as "inactive" so that it does not appear in the "Assign Access" / "Assign To" list.  

I would encourage you to head over to Canvas Ideas to submit it as an idea.  You can refer to https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructure-Community-Guide/tkb-p/community#Ideas for more information about the process.

You may also want to review It’s Time for Your Feedback on the Future of Ideas & Themes (2024-10-18) and Thank You for Your Feedback on Ideas and Themes (2024-11-21) for information about how the Ideas / Themes process will be changing in the future.

Going back to the proposed functionality and taking "Assign Access " / "Assign To" out of the picture, what you are trying to do may cause confusion or problems for course design and course management when preparing for the second semester and when the second semester is running.

For myself at my institution, I typically advise against making changes to a course shell after a semester has concluded because a semester course shell is considered an archive or time capsule of what a course looked like and what happened.

When preparing the course shell or while it is running, you/instructors may want to delete or unpublish content but deleting the content (obviously) deletes the content and some content cannot be unpublished because of previous submissions.

If this is something that you end up doing, I would be curious to know how it goes.

-Doug

P.S. I apologize for my additional comments. They are just the thoughts that were going through my head.

[jbarr]

Thank you @dbrace. I'm working in the beta environment, so nothing in my live course is changing. I'm the school Canvas Admin as well, so I play around with stuff like this to see if I can make life easier for everyone.

I'd thought about putting this into a request earlier, but I first wanted to make sure there wasn't a workaround. Headed that way!

[dbrace]

You are welcome, @jbarr.

We all try to make life easier for others and just wanted to throw my two cents in based on my initial thoughts for this situation.

-Doug

[chriscas]

Hi @jbarr,

I think the info provided by @dbrace is great. From my read of your question, you'd like to have the next semester section hidden right now, while the current ones remain visible, is that right?  If so, I do think that might disrupt the workflow of a lot of other teachers around the world.  We encourage teachers to set courses (including access to assignments) up ahead of each semester so everything is ready to go for students on day 1.  If sections didn't show up until the section start date, that would have a significant negative consequence for schools/institutions who operate as we do.  On the other side of the term, I wouldn't mind having students/sections with concluded (by term/section date or manually) hidden in the list, though there could be implications of that I'm not thinking about now either.  We conclude our terms by date pretty quickly, and we don't have many multi-term courses, so this issue doesn't surface for us.  We also ensure all of our sections have unique names, as we have a custom written sis to Canvas script.  Seems like you might want to work with your sis integration provider/team to see if the section names can be adjusted to be more unique to help avoid the confusion too.

Similar to @dbrace, these are just some thoughts I had while reading your post.  They may or may not be helpful at all.

-Chris