Add groups to differentiated assignments

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

 

  Idea will be open for vote May 5th, 2015 - August 5th, 2015  Learn more about voting...

 

It would be nice to have the ability to choose groups in the dropdown for differentiated assignments.  That way, you could have separate deadlines for group projects within the same assignment.  And even better, you could add a student to a group if she needs extended time turning in an assignment!

 

  Comments from Instructure

 

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas.

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2016-03-12)

59 Comments
ajohnson
Community Contributor

Would love this! We have a class with students in two different programs which have slightly different requirements, so one set of assignments is for group A and those plus more for Group B. We haven't figured out a way to make this work yet, except to give ALL assignments to everyone and ignore the 0s for Group A (which has fewer assignments). I totally thought this was what differentiated assignments would let me do until I tried it.

place
Community Novice

Hi, AnnMarie.

When I have folks who want to set up slightly different assignments for different groups, I create a couple of new course sections. Not ideal, but it does the job. Having the ability to do it by groups would be much easier to manage.

fontanap
Community Member

I had requested this feature on the old forum.  It would be a huge help in labs where different groups are completing the same assignment at different times, or in classes with group presentations happening on different days.

James_Kocher_UF
Community Champion

We do this now, and it has certain issues. First, being in multiple sections means students show up twice in the gradebook.  We've also found that if you remove a student from a created section, that student will get booted from any groups she may be in!

RobDitto
Community Champion

We have several courses in which a set of groups are divided into subsets -- e.g., "A Groups", "B Groups" and "C Groups". Teachers then differentiate certain assignments as done only by one subset.

cholling
Community Champion

good to know!

riggss
Community Novice

My institution is not using sections; however, we do have "slash" courses where grad and undergrads are grouped together with slightly different learning outcomes and assignments. This feature would be very helpful in setting up these courses.

aw05022a
Community Novice

We have a Banner integration at our institution and have to add additional sections to be able to set assignments to certain students.  With around 200 students in a course, this become a little time consuming to set up, but it works; however if the student drops the course, they remain on the manually created section which will cause red flags if the instructor is not paying attention!  This would be a HUGE add for us and one more work around we wouldn't have to do!

hvaughn
Community Contributor

I agree that this would be awesome.  We love differentiated assignments, especially with the newest update this weekend. It would be nice to be able to release an assessment to individual groups as well.

christine_mckeo
Community Novice

Absolutely LOVE the new differentiated assignments feature, but it seems a bit counterintuitive that the settings for group assignments v. individual/section-based assignments are located in different places. It'd be awesome if the old Group Assignment feature could be rolled into the new "Assign to:..." feature.