Enable Differentiated Learning at Scale

[AllisonHowell]

Theme Overview

Instructors need more flexibility through Canvas’ course-building tools to provide students with differentiated instruction based on their teaching goals and institutional initiatives. 

What value could this provide to users?

• Instructors can differentiate learning journeys and expectations across Canvas based on students’ learning needs
• Instructors can control access to content across Canvas based on a predetermined set of criteria
• Students can see content that’s relevant to their personal learning journey

Why was this theme chosen to open for voting?

April 2023 • As the educational landscape has continued to shift, institutions are more committed than ever to providing high-quality, personalized learning experiences for their learners. We want to support institutions and instructors seeking to leverage technology for this purpose by streamlining content differentiation in Canvas.

Why was this theme chosen for prioritization

June 2023 • Educators want a simple way to allocate content to specific learners or groups of learners so that they can provide content that’s relative to their personal learning journey. We continue to hear from our customers that they want to provide high-quality, personalized experiences, but are pressed for time and lack the flexibility needed to effectively differentiate. While we will not be able to prioritize all ideas within this theme in the second half of the year, we will focus on releasing modules to individuals or groups of individuals. A new theme will be created for additional ideas related to differentiated assignments and other content types.

[JamesSekcienski]

@AllisonHowell 

Thank you for the update!  That is great to hear that "Assign To" functionality will be coming to all key aspects of course content.  I'm looking forward to seeing these new features.  Do you know if the "Assign To" feature will allow the ability to assign to "No Students"?  That way content can be added to a course that is meant for teachers/tas/designers only and there isn't risk of it being published and students gaining access unexpectedly.

I really appreciate how active you have been on this theme and engaging with the community throughout the process for this.  It has been helpful to know what is in the works for this theme and feels like we are an active part of the feedback in this process.  I also appreciate that you are already thinking about next steps after this development round is over.

[AllisonHowell]

@JamesSekcienski Thank you for your kind words! As of right now the ability to assign to "no students" has not been planned. I'll admit I haven't heard of this request before now – our assumption is that the content remains unpublished and that it's been working fine. I'd love to understand this more as it sounds like a flow we aren't aware of. Mind sharing some more details of what your team does and why explicitly not assigning to students would be important? 

[JamesSekcienski]

@AllisonHowell 

You're welcome 😀

Since this is the first time you have heard about it, I will submit it as an Idea Request too so that it is documented.  I understand if it isn't able to be included during this development cycle, but I appreciate you considering it.

Currently we have a module that we include in our blueprint courses that provides information that should only be accessible by Instructors.  We put warnings in the naming conventions to not publish the module nor the content in the module.  This includes things like faculty specific support resources, information on how to use an external tool that is part of the course as a teacher (if applicable), a course history page that we use to manually track changes to the blueprint, and in some cases answer keys.  While some content isn't too sensitive if it accidentally gets published for students to see, things like answer keys are something we wouldn't want to accidentally have exposed. Depending on the course, the blueprint may contain more than one module that is labelled to not be published.

When the new update to publish all modules was released, this created a concern for us as this unpublished module and content may accidentally get published by a teacher using that feature.  If they forget to unpublish the module that shouldn't be published, then it would be left available for students to access.  For now we have removed the button to publish all modules, but left the extra benefits at an individual module level, to try to minimize the risk.  If we could set-up this content to Assign To no one, then perhaps we could set it that way in the blueprint and it would carry-over to the courses to ensure this content isn't available to students.  Then, we wouldn't have to disable the Publish All modules button since it wouldn't matter if the module/content was published or not.  It would also help in general in case someone does accidentally publish individual content that shouldn't be available to students by default.

Another way that it would be useful is with our audits of course readiness.  We check to make sure that due dates are set for all assignments that affect student grades.  However, some courses include extra assignments as back-ups/alternative assignments, like a make-up exam.  By default, it would be nice to set these as not assigned to anyone since it wouldn't be needed at first.  When checking for due dates, this would help to know that no one is assigned it so no due dates need to be set.  It could also allow us to identify content that is unpublished because the instructor is keeping it hidden for now (but will be used later) vs content that is unpublished because it isn't a required part of the course content.

[AllisonHowell]

Thanks so much for the info, @JamesSekcienski! I understand the pain point and know this issue with having info in modules that you don't want published is a common one. We have some ideas about how we might help address this problem that we are looking into. 

Your last paragraph is helpful new info for me. Thanks for sharing!

[JamesSekcienski]

@AllisonHowell 

You're welcome!  I'm glad to hear your team is thinking about ways to address the problem of wanting to keep some content permanently hidden from students.

[ACl5]

@AllisonHowell thank you so much for your work on this! I am wondering whether the option to add an additional attempt on an assignment just for one student made it into this theme that's being developed?