[Assignments] Assign to everyone except selected students

There are some assignments that go out to the majority of my students except one or two per class. It would be great to be able to assign to "everyone" and then have a button to select which students are exempt from the assignment.

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166 Comments
crystal_trotter
Community Novice

I would Love to be able to do this! It would help with differentiation because when we assign to a specific students, they still see the other on-level assignment since they are grouped with the other students by course section. If we could assign to the student specifically and then exclude them from the on-level assignment, it would make Canvas more user friendly for those students.

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

This idea has moved to the next stage and will be open for voting among the Canvas Community, from Wed. November 4, 2015 - Wed. February, 3, 2015.

Check out this doc for additional details about how the voting process works!

rpetrina
Community Member

Just had a use case for this exact thing. Smiley Happy

LisaCasto
Community Novice

K-12  absolutely has to have this! While we love the already completed work with differentiated, need this aspect to help us differentiate by time and content. Without this, teachers are trying to type names in--and that is not practical with some course loads!

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

Please do share your use case!

rpetrina
Community Member

An instructor uses electronic testing in a proctored environment, but has a student who needs to take the test outside the main exam window. She also wanted to enable a special password for this student to ensure that he went to the testing center (a common testing center practice -- they release the password to the student when he arrives).

So she created a copy of the test with the additional security of a password, and assigned it specifically to this one student for makeup. Now she's got the original of the test assigned to Everyone... except there's no need for it to be assigned to this makeup student, and she'd rather it not be confusing in his personal Gradebook. This is where "Everyone but.." comes in.

Same situation with graduate students who sometimes enroll in lower-level courses but will be asked to complete separate, more complex assignments to receive grad credit. You create the assignment for the grad student...and then you would use "Everyone but" that graduate student for the rest of the class.

retannenbaum
Community Participant

Here's another usage case: I have an extra credit assignment that is a follow-up to a paper. I don't want that extra credit to be available to the few students who didn't complete the extra assignment. So if I've got 40 people in the class, and want it available to 35 of them, I need to type in all 35 names.

(And yes, I realize I could make it be for everyone, then just put a disclaimer in the assignment instructions. But I find that this becomes confusing for students, which means lots of emails to me asking about that extra credit and why I'm not letting them do it, or what is this random assignment now showing up in their calendar.)

terry_hill
Community Novice

Yes, please!  There are some assignments that go out to the majority of my students except one or two per class. It would be great to be able to assign to "everyone" and then have a button to select which students are exempt from the assignment.

dhulsey
Community Champion

Part of my attendance policy states that I will cut students off from submitting to Canvas if they stop attending class. The Implementation of this feature would make enforcing that policy much easier.

cassandra_stack
Community Novice

I thought we already had this option?