Two classes within one section/class

[PangoChango]

I'm teaching what is supposed to be an in-person class. Let's say there's 20 students. Due to the pandemic, etc., however, 10 of those students have requested to take the course fully online. 

I understand that it is possible, and from what I can tell, popular, to combine two sections into one. But I want to do the opposite. Is there a way to divide the students into two groups, and post assignments, pages, files, etc. for one group that will not be seen by the other? 

The problem is that I would like to give slightly different material and assignments to the two groups, but it is confusing for the students to get notices for both groups, since technically they're all enrolled under the same Canvas shell. 

I realize that a work around would be to simply label everything with "For the Online Students," and "For the In-person students: Today's reading" or something like that. But that's still going to mean that students will see all the alerts, roughly 1/2 of which won't apply to them. 

I also know that I can assign a Canvas "Assignment" so that it only goes to certain students (selected with the drop-down menu). That's better than nothing, but it's not perfect, since let's say that I want to post a schedule announcement about tomorrow's class. It might be confusing if on the student's screen that shows up as an "Assignment" (complete with points, due date, etc)

Thanks Community😎

[gpillsbury · Accepted solution]

While you won't be able to control everything with this idea, are you able to create a new section in the course? (Go to Settings > Sections and see if you have the new section button. Your admin may have removed that permission for Teachers in your account). If so, create a section called "Online", enroll the online students into it, and remove them from the default section.

The existence of the new section will allow you to assign different assignments (discussions, quizzes, etc) to each section without having to manually choose each online student every time.  You can also post announcements that only go to a specific section.  However, you cannot limit visibility of course resources (pages, files, modules) to specific sections. For those, yes, you'd have to label them somehow so the students know what to look at.

Hope that helps!