Is there a way to have Teachers in a course view all students' names while limiting Grading To-Do?

[EvanDonovan]

Is there a way to have Teachers in a course view all students' names but only have a certain set of students assigned for grading?

Right now, we have Teachers in our courses that are assigned to different sections of the course, which each have different Students in them. The Teachers are set to "this user can only view students in their assigned course section(s)", which works the way that we want it to for the grading to-do list, since it means that the to-do list only shows the students they have been assigned to grade.

However, the Teachers would like to be able to see the names of the other students in the course. Right now, the only way that they can do that is by going into Discussions, collapsing the Discussion, and seeing the students' names.

It would be better if they could get them, however, from the People tab.

Is there a way that we could set up Canvas so we could do this?

We had received a suggestion from someone at another school that we could create a new user role. However, as far as I can tell, if we set any user role to "this user can only view students in their assigned course section(s)", then they can only see the students in the other sections on the Discussions. And we can't switch the Teachers to see students in all sections, or their grading to-do list would include people they are not supposed to grade.

[nwilson7 · Accepted solution]

@EvanDonovan I do not believe there is a way to have both, you basically either know about all students, or you only know about your section. 

It sounds like your teachers may be very dependent on the "to-do list" so this suggestion may not help at all but for our classes that work the same way (large class but then really each teacher has a section) we do not put the "This user can only view their assigned course section(s)" and then they use the section filter in the gradebook.  They do not pay much attention to the to-do list and work more in the gradebook and this seems to work well for them.  They are able to see all the students and even look at their work when needed.  We also sometimes have them cross-teaching so this helps with that.  For example while Teacher A might not be your normal teacher, they taught a specific unit as that is their expert area so now they can grade everyone on that topic and not just the students normally assigned to them.  This has also helped when another teacher needs to fill in for whatever reason too.

Hope this helps!

-Nick

[EvanDonovan]

Thanks, that's what I suspected.

I think for most of our professors, who are not very tech-savvy, the To-Do List has been the great time-saver in our migration to Canvas this term.

However, your idea of having faculty use the section filter, and then grade from the gradebook, could be an alternative for any of our faculty who wanted to have full visibility of the course.