[Groups] Showing at least one group membership column on the People page.

On this page "https://sjsu.instructure.com/courses/<course_id>/users" add a column (or columns) to show which group a student has been assigned to.

At the moment we have:

Name, Login ID, SIS ID, Section, Role, Last Activity, Total Activity.  

My suggestion is to append columns to the table, one for each group set, showing which group the student belongs.

An added feature would be to allow sorting of the list by any of the columns. 

Added to Theme

33 Comments
sthomas27
Community Member

Yes, please add this feature!  It is very frustrating for students.

Ambiguous
Community Explorer

Three years and they still haven't "fixed" this.  Canvas is soooo slow and dealing with "problems".

aod
Community Member

It seems pretty clear they don't actually care about comments, ideas or problems!

gutow
Community Novice

I agree this should be a high priority. Students are less sophisticated than most instructors. Anything that makes it harder for them to find what they need is bad.

I agree with other comments that considering the amount of money that institutions subscribing the Canvas are paying, there ought to be much faster forward movement on improvements.

I work on fully volunteer open source projects that move faster. Why should we keep using Canvas instead of Moodle or a custom flavor of one of the good open source CMSes?

JLBOLKEN
Community Novice

When a teacher uses a variety of groupings throughout the year, the list in the people lab gets really, really log especially when courses are cross listed and they can see other classes groups. When I am in my People tab, the groups are in tabs across the top of the window. Why don't students have the same tabs option across the top of their page as well to make getting to and signing up in the groups quicker and easier? Just a thought!

RobDitto
Community Champion

@JLBOLKEN, consider rating or commenting on this closely-related, long-running idea asking for tabs for how students see group sets at People:

ayost
Community Member

In teacher view under People, I can see tabs for each of the project groups I've set up for a particular class (i.e. STEM Fair project, Organ System Project, etc.), however, my students just see one LOOOONNNG list of project names. If I've created 150 STEM Fair groups and 45 groups for the Organ System project, they just have to scroll and scroll (or search) to find the correct group. It would be much better if they could simply see tabs, much like the teacher view.

RebeccaVanMeter
Community Member

This is really difficult for students to navigate. The technology is there, because we, as instructors, see it the easy way. PLEASE make it so for students! Also please make sure the technology recognizes number order sequencing. For example I do class participation by date: 2-8 and 2-15. The system currently puts 2-15 before 2-8, so it makes it even harder for students to find the right group.

JiyaoChen
Community Novice

Under the People page in the current Canvas setting, all discussion groups at the whole class appear to a student, although most of the groups are not relevant to the specific student. It is hard for a student to know which group she/her belongs to. This issue becomes severe when a class has different types of groups. In this case, an instructor's canvas page organizes these different groups by the group title, which is good, but students' canvas page simply dumps all kinds of groups together. 

James
Community Champion

@JiyaoChen 

While not addressing your specific concern, there is an alternative. If you go to the groups link on the global navigation menu, it only shows the groups that you are a member of. Unfortunately, it does not have the name of the course in the name of the group unless the instructor created the groups that way. It does provide a link to see All Groups and this option will tell you what the course is as well as listing groups from previous terms.

If you go to the People page within the course navigation menu, then it can be a bit crowded. As you mention, the instructor's interface is nicer with separate tabs for each group set. If the instructor allows students to organize their own groups, then this shows up as "Student Groups" for the instructor, but as one of many groups on the existing Groups tab for the student. Again, better organization for teacher than there is for the students.

For the instructor, this limits the number of tabs based on what they have chosen (everyone, student groups, and any groups they've created). For the student, that same organization could be beneficial, although it requires the students to remember two things (group set and group name) instead of just one.

Within each group set that allows students to join or leave groups, it is necessary for students to see all of them so that they can tell what groups are available to join or leave. For the group sets that are locked, it might be nice to see just your group. But then it may also be nice sometimes to know who is part of the other groups.