Automate and Streamline Group Membership

[AllisonHowell]

Theme Overview

Several workflows related to group membership and assignments can result in time-consuming manual work for instructors and cause confusion for students.  

What value could this provide to users?

• Group membership reflects the current course roster
• Group membership changes are automatically synced across Canvas
• Instructors can set more parameters when enabling group self sign-up

Why was this theme chosen to open for voting?

October 2023 • Simplify group enrollment and management in Canvas, to ensure a user-friendly experience for both instructors and students.

Why was this theme chosen for prioritization? 

January 2024 • This theme was selected because it’s strongly aligned with our desire to support large courses and non-traditional use cases. We aim to streamline existing processes and introduce new functionality to save users time.

[ProductPanda]

October 16 - November 15, 2023

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[RachelSalmon]

I wanted to ask for clarification around the idea "Copy Group Settings" that is referenced. I wanted to confirm that this meant it is Canvas's intention to allow group sets to be copied into courses with a course import. That would be so beneficial for my school so I wanted to confirm before getting too excited. Thanks!

[Gregory_Putman]

@RachelSalmon my concern, too!  I hope someone can clarify this.  Being able to link group sets to assignments in my template courses before copying and have them copy along with other content would save so much time and effort that could be better directed at student engagement instead of mouse clicking for hours

[JamesSekcienski]

@RachelSalmon That is a feature that members of our school believe would be helpful too.  By setting it up in our course templates, it will help make it easier for instructors to get started with using groups for group-based assignments.

We also think it is important for the enrollment in groups to match enrollment changes in courses.  If a student is inactive, concluded, or deleted from a course, then their group enrollment that is associated with a course should reflect this too.  We don't want to lose any grade history/student activity, but students that aren't active in a course shouldn't be active in a group for that course.

[rake_9]

A number of the referenced ideas would address problems with creating and populating groups and ensuring that assignments work properly when group membership changes.  Addressing these would go a long to making groups more useful in Canvas.  The current set up would work fine if course contents, assignments, and enrollments didn't change mid-stream!

[james_whalley]

If [Groups] Allow students to create their own groups of a specific size for assignments becomes a feature, you would probably need to ensure group members add themselves after the group creator makes the group. Otherwise, somebody could make a group with members that are not meant to be in that group.

[james_whalley]

If [Groups] Add students to multiple groups becomes a feature, maybe there could be a setting so that group set cannot be used for graded assignments.

[james_whalley]

[Groups] Group submission go out of sync in speedgrader if you move students into different groups seems like a sticky one. I could see having an alert, but having a grade a student earned as part of a group follow them when they get assigned to a new group would be good for (A) a new assignment that has a group shake-up within the same Group Set, but bad for (B) an assignment where a student was assigned to one group and then had changed group membership after Group 1 had submitted their work.

[mbmacdonald]

I notice that faculty get confused about the difference between sections and groups. A lot of times, what faculty actually want is *Sections* because they only want to create administrative groupings for the purpose of gradebook filtering, differentiated assignments, due dates etc. But faculty have less control over sections, so they often default to using groups, which feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Now all of a sudden there are these "group spaces" for the students to get lost in, when the instructor just wanted a more manageable gradebook.

I have some more thoughts about groups but I will add them as separate comments.

[mbmacdonald]

Related to my previous comment, in addition to the confusion between Sections and groups, there is also confusion related to the use of the term "Group" in Assignments also. I wish that Assignment groups were called "Categories."

Sorry, I know this doesn't directly address the theme but it is related to groups.

[nuscitpkg]

Agree with @mbmacdonald . At our institution, I have to constantly remind colleagues that an Assignment Group is not a Group Assignment (and vice-versa). My explanation is to think of Assignment Groups as Assignment Folders, but Assignment Categories is a good alternative name.

[Anna_Shaver]

The point about groups vs sections is good... But I definitely want groups. I often use differentiated assignments for groups within my class, and I need those group sets to persist across a new import so I don't have to recreate the groups and re-assign every assignment for every class every quarter.

[mbmacdonald]

@Anna_Shaver ok interesting- Groups are linked to the course and can be copied. That's important. Perhaps I just wish that when an instructor creates a group, they could choose whether or not this group needs a "group space".

It is also a bit strange to me that a student gets to their group space from Global Navigation. I think this should be in the *course* navigation menu, and it should be more clear how to get out of the group space, and back into the main course. Maybe these are things I can change in account settings?

To the mods: apologize if these comments are not appropriate for this space. With the new settings in Ideas, this is the only chance we get to post comments on ideas, so I don't want to miss the chance.

[anna_volkova]

In the Nordics a lot of the assignments are done in groups. We find this theme very important for us in Sweden. It is common that group membership changes during course runs or an academic year, and we find it very important that Canvas assignments/Speedgrader work despite these changes. It causes even more trouble when the assignments are peer-reviewed, and when teachers forget to assign the right group set or assign all of the students correctly into groups.

The teachers are quite often unaware of this since no warnings appear when they set up assignments, and for example are missing a correctly created group set. It then requires a lot of additional work on their part, like figuring out who submitted what, helping out with peer-reviews, or - recreating the assignment altogether. Students in their turn might have to later submit their assignments once again to a different recreated assignment so that everything appears right in the Speedgrader. More details: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Ideas/Groups-Difficulty-Setting-up-Group-Sets-for-Group-Di... 

Thanks!

[hugo_landgren]

Another feature that would be useful for us is the possibility to set conditions for when a student can join a group. 

For example laborations. In many labs we want students to complete a quiz (or assignment) before they are allowed to choose a lab group. This is mostly for safety reasons but can also be for pedagogical reasons. 

[LMacaulay]

I am hopeful that you will allow differentiated assignments via groups so that we can stop using sections (and all the extra work for admins this entails) to accomplish this. We often group students and those groups have unique due dates for assignments, but the assignments are not submitted as a group. Each person submits their own. Clicking the "individual" checkbox doesn't help because the students only see the submission of the last person to submit, not their own, so they get stressed out thinking they didn't submit. Grading the submissions takes so many more clicks to see everyone's submissions.

If I need this in higher ed, I can only imagine how helpful this would be to K-12 where a teachers different things to each reading group, for example.

[choryuen_wong]

We had an incident recently where some of our instructors, TAs, and students were removed from their courses. Our team was able to re-add them back into their courses. However, the students' group membership were not restored when the students were re-added back. It would be helpful to add a feature where a student that gets re-added back to their course, they will get re-added back to whichever group they were in previously.