Is there an easy way to isolate discussions between sections at the course level?

[chris_clement]

In our Catalog instance we have a course in which sections are used to separate enrollments into date ranges.  This is the preferred over duplicating the course shell so that we can maintain a single Catalog listing.

How do I change the start and end dates for a cour... - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

This course has an interactive component that utilizes discussions.  The goal is to have students participate in discussions only with those who are in the same section.  The issue is that without any additional management, students can see discussion posts for all sections.

We have reviewed the documentation and searched the community.  At the moment, it would seem that the cleanest way to proceed would be to duplicate each discussion and essentially create a copy for each section that is assigned to only that section.  This requires some manual effort for the instructor each time a new section is created for this course.  Additionally, the instructor would see a large list of duplicated discussions which will grow over time as new sections are added.

This can work...  But we're hoping for a cleaner/simpler solution.  Something a single setting might accomplish.

Is it possible to easily isolate discussions between sections at the course level?  Some sort of course setting that basically says students can only interact with students in the same section?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks in advance!

[SusanNiemeyer]

You can create Groups, and then make the discussions "Group Discussions." Then, for example, the students in the Red Group will only interact with the Red Group members. You can form Groups by going to the People tab. 

This will require to you to figure out which students are in each Section and then create a Group for  these students. There is duplication of work as "Groups" and "Sections" don't talk with each other, as far as I can tell. The good news is that you only need to set up the Groups one time for the entire semester (or year). 

Perhaps, hopefully, someone else will have a better answer for you.

[chris_clement]

Good morning Susan,

I appreciate your response and have forwarded your answer to the inquiring party.  I think, in our case, the hope is that some form of "one click" solution exists.  Something like:

[X] Prevent students from interacting between sections.

From what I can see in the documentation, no such setting exists.  But I figured it is worth asking as we are probably not the only institution with this use case in mind.

Thanks again!

[nwilson7 · Accepted solution]

@chris_clement what @SusanNiemeyer suggested is probably your best bet currently.  When you manually add someone to a section, you can say that they can only interact with their section but that checkbox only comes up when you manually are adding people to sections.  You can create different discussions and then assign them to just a specific section.  For the students, they are only able to see (and are only aware of) things assigned to them.  For the instructor though, they would see all of them both in the discussions area and in the gradebook so I know some instructors do not like this method as it clutters things up in their views.

One sort of cool trick though with the group idea:  When creating a group set, have Canvas automatically assign students, set the amount of groups to be the same as the number of sections in the course, and then check the box that students must be in the same section.  This will create groups that exactly match your sections.  Note: groups do not sync with user changes so if someone switches sections in the course, their group will not automatically update.

Hope this helps!

-Nick