Filter Gradebook by Groups

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

This is reviving quite a few suggestions, including Grades - Filter or Sort Students by GroupsAdd "Groups" filtering feature to Assignments/Grading, and Gradebook Smart View by Group.

 

We need a way to filter the gradebook using student groups. Right now, the gradebook can only be filtered by sections within a course. There are quite a few use cases for requesting this functionality:

 

1. We have several large classes where the TAs are responsible for grading a subsection of a section within a course. This becomes tedious, because the filtering options for the gradebook limit this by section only. So if they have a section of 40 students but are only responsible for grading 20 of those, they need to create a section to filter the gradebook. This becomes troublesome when there are 400+ students in the course since creating sections requires the manual work of clicking on each student to change their associated sections. Even with section-anonymity turned on, this is still 60+ clicks for one subsection of 20 students.

 

2. We have several programs that use outside folks as facilitators who grade/interact with students. We set-up student groups for these folks so they can communicate with just their group of students. It would be nice to filter the gradebook of these groups instead of writing the facilitator's name in the Notes column or manually creating sections for the groups.

 

3. Some of our courses have several different groups in them for various purposes (different projects, in-class groups, etc). In general, it would be nice if instructors could filter off these groups to compare student performance and involvement.

 

As a final note, the drag-and-drop functionality of Groups is much easier to use than the manual process of creating sections. While manageable for small numbers, it's simply too much to handle for large courses.

This idea has been added to our product plan for Q2 2019 and will influence development within Canvas. Follow this idea to receive updates as they are available.

 :smileyinfo: Adding this idea to our product plan means we will be working on it, but it does not guarantee that it will be developed exactly as defined by the idea, or that it will be added to the production environment.

 

Read more about the feature idea process:

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Release Notes (2019-06-22)‌ & https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-17625 

73 Comments
kmeeusen
Community Champion

Hi  @kas200 

I see you have done your homework, and searched out past ideas!

Currently the feature idea process is currently on hold while it undergoes revisions. You can learn more at Changes are closer for Canvas Community Feature Ideas , and you can get a sneak preview here Changes are closer for Canvas Community Feature Ideas and even participate in the discussions here Focus Group: DRAFT Feature Idea Space . Once the new process is in place your idea will be evaluated by the Community Team.

I hope this helps,

KLM

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

Thank you for your idea!  It will open for voting, March 1, 2017, as part of the relaunch of feature idea voting!  Find out more about the changes we made in Changes are here: New feature idea processes went live Friday! (2/24/17)

alh245
Community Participant

Hi,

I add "Group 01" or what ever group the students are in to the Notes column in the Gradebook.  Then I can sort the gradebook by Groups by clicking at the top of the column.  Does that help?

-Amy Garbrick

kas200
Community Participant
Author

While that does help in some cases and we do indeed use it as a workaround, it's not always an ideal solution. In large courses where there's 300+ students, this would be a pain to set-up.

sendres
Community Participant

I just concluded a course in which we had 300 participants broken into groups of 25. Different instructors were assigned to grade each group, and all of the students had been assigned to groups at random. What we didn't realize is that the instructors would spend all day scrolling through the roster trying to pick their 25 students out of the 300. The ability to view the grades page by group would make this much easier!

kas200
Community Participant
Author

Came across another use case today! Advisors will be using groups to manage their students (in order to use group-specific announcements and discussions), who will be submitting to a course-wide assignment for collecting information. Those advisors then need to see their students quickly in the grade book, but can't do so since they can't filter based off groups. We're using the Notes workaround for now, but it's inconvenient to do so.

pan2da
Community Novice

I would also like to be able to filter UN-graded quiz and survey results by Group.

a1051490
Community Novice

This would make life a lot easier. Would be good to have more group functionality throughout, such as being able to send announcements to multiple groups, and to be able to view analytics by groups too. Our institution has turned off manual creation of sections so that functionality is not available.

robin_litenteja
Community Novice

Creating SmartViews, which we had in Blackboard, is absolutely essential to managing grading for large groups of students.  We can set up groups in Canvas, but there also must be the possibility to view that group in the gradebook.  That's a basic necessity that I hope Canvas will fix.

jwrobinson
Community Novice

While it may help with organization issues, does the SpeedGrader allow you to assign grades while the list is sorted into this order?  I haven't found a way to make that happen yet, but I'm not above being blind or just too dumb to find it...